‘I think you’re right,’ I said, ‘but how the hell did he get in there without us knowing?’
At that moment, a bat entered the clearing, did a swift and cautious investigation and then flew away, demonstrating first of all the complete silence of its approach and, secondly, the fact that from where our hut was, higher up the hill, we could not have seen it, for once it entered the clearing, it vanished into the broken shadows.
By now, the light had strengthened considerably and, to our excitement, we could see not one, but ten bats hanging in the nets. To say that we were elated was putting it mildly, for, secretly, I think all of us had felt our chances of success were slight.
The bats were hanging, immobile, in the nets and as they were not struggling and panicking, we decided to wait for a while and see if we caught any more before releasing them. Several
bats flew into the clearing during the next half-hour, but they were too cautious and kept too high to get entangled in the mist nets. At length, it became obvious that we were not going to catch any more, and so we got our supply of Tantes ready and set about the task of disentangling the ones we had caught.
First of all, we sexed them. To our irritation, they were all males. They were even more beautiful close to than from a distance, for their backs were a bright chestnut fox red, changing to glittering spun gold on the shoulders and belly. The soot black wings were as fine and soft as chamois leather. Their funny little, chubby, golden faces with pale, straw-coloured yellow eyes, made them look like strange, indignant, miniature, flying teddy bears. The fine mesh of the net had done a good job and the delicate wings of each bat were intricately entangled; after spending a quarter of an hour trying to free one wing unsuccessfully, we gave up and simply cut the animals loose.
Even this had to be done with great care to make sure you did not cut or tear the delicate wing membrane, and at the same time we tried to do as little damage as possible to the net.
It was a difficult job, not made any easier by the anger of the bats, who seized every opportunity to sink their needle-sharp teeth into unwary fingers. But, at last, we had cut them all loose without doing too much damage to the nets, and placed them safely in individual Tantes. Then we attended to the laborious business of mending the nets and re-hanging them aloft again. By this time, our two helpers had arrived to take over the day shift, and were vastly amused by our story of the house and the sandwich-eating snails. They set about rebuilding our banana- leaf shelter. We left them, promising to return in the evening, and carried our bats in triumph down to Port Mathurin.
The local school, with extreme generosity, had offered us a newly-built classroom — as yet untenanted by the knowledge- hungry youth of Rodrigues — in which to keep our bats. It was a room some twenty feet by ten feet, newly painted and decorated, and ideal, as far as we were concerned, for keeping bats in. We had decked it out with plenty of branches and various hanging trays of wire on which we were going to serve the galaxy of fruit we had brought from Mauritius. We decided that we would let all the males we had caught loose in the room, and keep any females we got in Tantes. Lest I be accused of being a Chauvinist Pig, let me hasten to say that this apparent discrimination was due entirely to the fact that the females we got would be immensely more valuable than the males, and so we would have to be very careful with them.
Late in the afternoon, we returned to the glade and our two faithful bat watchers. In the fading afternoon light, we climbed to our vantage point in the valley and watched the colony. By and large, there was little movement, although the bats slept fitfully and frequently, and with great agility changed sleeping positions, moving through the branches with the aid of the hooks on their wings, with extraordinary skill. Only occasionally did one take flight and flap languidly round, before returning to the same roost or finding a new one.
On the whole, the colony was very silent; there was occasional bickering when a bat got too close to one of its sleeping compatriots, but this was seldom.
There was, however, one bat in the colony that was far from silent. It was a fat baby that we had christened ‘Ambrose’, and he was being weaned by his mother and was not taking kindly to the process. Although he was almost as big as she was he did not see why he should not cling to her as he had always done, nor why he should give up suckling whenever he felt like it. His mother, however, was being firm about it and his rage and petulance were horrible to hear. Screeching and twittering, he pursued his unfortunate mother from branch to branch, endeavouring to pull her within range with the hooks on his wings, and letting out outraged shrieks of frustration when he failed. The only let-up to this awful noise came when his mother, nerves cracking under the strain, would take flight and settle in a tree some distance away. Then Ambrose would stop screaming briefly, because he was concentrating all his efforts on screwing up the courage to fly after her. Eventually he would join her and as soon as he had recovered from the journey, his whining and importuning would start all over again.
'What a ghastly bat,’ said Ann, ‘I’d slaughter it if it were mine.’
‘It needs to be sent to a public school,’ said John, judiciously.
‘A reform school would be better,’ suggested Ann.
‘All I can say is that I hope we don’t, by some mischance, catch it in the nets. If we do, it will be one we will certainly let go, even if it’s female,’ I said.
‘Too true,’ said John. ‘Imagine having that screeching around you all day.’
When it grew dark, we moved down to our banana- leaf home and spent the night with some persistent giant snails, several million mosquitoes, and one or two large and belligerent centipedes. The rat did not visit us, and I can only suppose he was in his burrow having a nervous breakdown. In the morning, we found we had caught two more bats and these, to our delight, proved to be females. We cut them loose and transported them carefully to the schoolroom, where our previous captives had settled down very well. The floor was deep in guano, and there was fruit everywhere.
We were booked to leave on the flight to Mauritius that took off at two o’clock the following day, so this meant that we had to catch our full quota of bats early that morning. It was obviously going to be touch and go, but in the green light of dawn, to our relief, we saw that we had caught thirteen bats and that among them were the females we required. In all, we had caught twenty-five bats; seven of the males we were going to release. Having extracted the thirteen bats from the nets and put them in their individual Tantes, we folded up the nets and for the last time climbed up the rocky path, out of Cascade Pigeon. As we left, we could hear Ambrose still screeching imploringly to his mother. That was one bat who was determined not to become extinct if he could help it!
When we got to the schoolroom, we had to go through the process of checking on all the male bats and picking out the right proportion of fully adult and of younger males, so that we would have the right age balance in our colonies. This done, we gathered up all the surplus males in Tantes and drove out of town to the beginning of the Cascade
Pigeon to let them go. We chose a really high vantage point and threw the bats, one at a time, into the air. They all turned towards the colony further up the valley. There was quite a stiff breeze blowing down the valley, and it was interesting to note that the bats flying against it made very heavy weather and had to land in the trees frequently for a rest. We wondered how they would fare in a cyclone lasting three or four days, or a week.