Thus encouraged, we decided that the maximum number we could take without damaging the survival chances of the colony and the minimum number we needed for successful breeding groups was eighteen specimens. As with most animals which lived in colonies, I felt that the bats would need the stimulus of their own kind about them if they were to settle down and breed successfully, therefore, it was useless thinking in terms of one pair or even two pairs. The numbers had to give the impression of a colony, albeit a small one. But it is one thing to decide how many and what sexes of an animal you are going to catch, even if you know where it is; quite another to accomplish this successfully.
The clearing we had chosen for our operations was about a quarter of a mile from the colony, and lay on the route down the valley which they seemed to take when flying off to feed each evening. When they actually flew down the valley, it was at a slightly lower level than the clearing but here I was hoping that the Jak fruit (now making the hotel unique as a hostelry) would come into its own and lure the bats up to our level.
The method of capture we chose was simplicity itself. With the aid of Jean Claude and a compatriot (who distressed my intrepid explorer’s instincts by wearing a tee shirt emblazoned with the words ‘I dig President Kennedy’) we hitched up some eight mist nets to the trees so that they formed a hollow square or box, some fifty feet by seventy feet, with walls about forty feet high. Then, out of wire netting, we built something that looked like a miniature coffin, heavily disguised with branches, and slung it in readiness in the centre of the nets. This was to be the repository for the fruit. Thus, having organised everything satisfactorily, we sped back to the hotel, had a hasty meal and returned to the valley, armed with torches and fruit, just as the twilight was turning greenish, preparatory to fading into grey.
The bats were waking up, getting ready for their nightly sortie for food. They were more vocal and they kept taking off from the mango trees and flying in anxious circles round it before settling again. It was obvious that it was not quite dark enough for them yet. We stuffed our wire coffin with over-ripe mangoes, bananas and pineapples, and then I approached the Jak fruit with a machete. Without waiting for it to protest, I split it in twain lengthways, and then wished I had not done so. I had believed that it was impossible for the smell of this endearing fruit to get any stronger, but I was wrong. Within seconds, apparently, the whole of Rodrigues smelt strongly of Jak fruit. Hoping the bats would appreciate it, even if we did not, we stuffed the fruit into the coffin and hauled the whole thing up until, in its shroud of branches, it hung some twenty feet up in the centre of the nets. Then we found ourselves a suitable hiding place in the bushes overlooking the trap, and settled down to wait. Unfortunately, owing to the fact that we had been forced to discard most of our clothing in an effort to save weight, we were all clad in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, a garb that did not help us when approximately three-quarters of the mosquito population of Rodrigues decided to join us in our vigil.
So we waited, our cars ringing with the shrill, excited, friendly cries of the mosquitoes, while the green twilight faded into grey and then an even darker shade. Just before it became too dark to see, the bats started to flight. They flew singly, or in little groups of three or four, heading down the valley towards Port Mathurin. As they flapped across the sky at the edge of our clearing, they looked astonishingly big and their slow, heavy flight made them resemble something out of a Dracula movie. With praise-worthy single-mindedness, they flew down the valley, not deviating to right or left, and completely ignoring us, our nets and our odoriferous bait of overripe fruit. We sat there in a haze of mosquitoes, scratching ourselves and glowering at the passing stream of bats. Presently, the stream thinned to a trickle and then to the odd late risers, flapping hurriedly after the bulk of the colony. Soon there were no bats at all. Not one of them had displayed the faintest interest in our Jak-fruit-permeated clearing.
‘Well, this is jolly,’ said John, stretching his lanky form out of one of the bushes, like a wounded giraffe. ‘I’m rather glad we came really, I would hate to think of all these mosquitoes going hungry.’
^Yes, it’s a form of conservation programme really,’ I said. ‘You can imagine how many mosquitoes we have saved from starvation tonight. In years to come, the World Wildlife Fund will probably erect a posthumous Golden Ark on this spot to commemorate our contribution to nature.’
‘It’s all very well for you to joke,’ said Ann, bitterly. ‘You don’t seem to be affected when they bite you, whereas I itch like hell and then swell up and go red.’
‘Never mind,’ I said, soothingly, ‘just close your eyes and try to work out what we are going to do with all those bats we are going to catch.’
Ann grunted derisively. After a couple of hours, when no bats had appeared and when the mosquitoes had returned for the main course, as it were, we held a council of war. I felt it was important that at least one of us should stay there all night in case a bat or bats returned and got caught. The nets were slung up in such a complicated way that it was impossible to lower them, and I did not want any bats to hang in the nets all night, should one be caught. After some discussion, we all decided to stay and made ourselves as comfortable as we could among the bushes, having decided that one would keep watch, while the others slept.
Then, in the early hours of the morning, the rain began. There was no warning, no thunder, no lightning, none of those brash preliminaries. There was suddenly a roar like an avalanche of steel ball-bearings as the clouds parted and dropped rain on us with the concentrated fury of a suddenly opened flood gate. Within seconds, we were soaked and sitting in what appeared to be the opening stages of a waterfall, that had all the promise of growing into something like Niagara. The rain, in contrast to the hot, steamy night, felt as if it had newly emerged from some glacier, and we shivered with cold. We removed from the bushes to a spot under the tree as this afforded us a little more shelter; the leaves were being machine-gunned by huge raindrops and the water was running in streams down the tree trunks.
We stood it for an hour, then an investigation proved that the sky over the whole island was black and stretched, as far as we could make out, from Cascade Pigeon across the Indian Ocean to Delhi. It was obvious that no self-respecting bat was going to fly around in that torrential downpour, so we packed up our dripping equipment and made our way back to the hotel where we could at least shelter from the rain and the mosquitoes, and snatch two or three hours’ sleep. We were determined to be back at the nets at dawn, for this was when the bats would return from their feeding grounds and might conceivably blunder into our nets.
Dawn saw us, stiff and half-asleep, crouched under the nets, in a strange green light. The whole forest smelt warm and as redolent as a fruit cake freshly made from an oven. The scents of the earth and moss and leaves, air-warmed and rain-washed, were strong enough but transcending all these subtle olfactory treats was the bugle-blast of the Jak fruit, slung some twenty feet above us. Presently, the sky lightened and soon the bats reappeared, flapping languidly back to their roost. A number had passed us when, to our excitement, several veered away from what could be described as the flight path and circled over our clearing in a suspicious, but interested manner, before flapping off to the mango tree. Encouraged by this show of interest, we spent the day rigging up more nets among the trees, helped by sudden downpours of rain.