A book about bats

Silently By Night: About the little-known but fascinating world of bats
by Russell Peterson



There are only two books about bats at the Tokoroa Library, and this is one of them. I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it before, since I have a fairly long list of bat books on my Amazon.com wishlist but this wasn’t on it. This book was published in 1964 and really dates itself with statements that try to explain the distribution of different bat families around the world, “There have been varied hypotheses regarding the representation of species in both the Old and New Worlds, ranging from the wildly improbable to some very sound reasoning. Wegener asserted that there was a splitting of world, one drifting from another. Matthew reasoned that land masses have remained stable except for the flucuations of tide levels and eruptive forces from within the earth.” Boy, was Peterson wrong in his reference to the ‘wildly improbable’ and the ‘very sound reasoning.’ This book made it to print just a year before continental drift was accepted, and Peterson’s statements made in pre-drift ignorance have demonstrated to me how profoundly plate tectonics enhanced our understanding of biology. For example, now that we know when Pangea split up to form Laurasia and Gondwanaland, we are better able to understand why Australia and South America have marsupial mammals and the rest of the world doesn’t (with the exception of the Virginia opossum in North America). This site has a good explanation if you’re interested:
http://biology.clc.uc.edu/courses/bio303/contdrift.htm

The second obvious way in which this book dates itself is Peterson’s zeal for collecting bat specimens. He wrote, “… for what naturalist will not glory in a fresh specimen of an exceptionally rare species of animal?” While we can still learn much from the zealous collecting of earlier generations of scientists, we mostly opt for methods of study that don’t destroy the subject.

Like Krakatoa, the writing style was pretty old fashioned (unlike Krakatoa, this one really was 40 years old!). I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone unless they were already really interested in bats, since now there are much better books out there to introduce people to this unique critters. My favorite aspect of the book were the little illustrations of bats in the page margins.



He didn’t have a drawing of the long-tailed bat, so I was inspired to do a drawing of my own.



This is drawn from a photo Kerry took of Alfred (an injured bat who was brought to her before we arrived). Alfred, Bernie… we’re going in alphabetical order so the next bat we catch will start with C.

Carrie

P.S. Our next post will be about what we've been up to instead of just what we've been reading. We just got back from 4 days along the nice, warm coast.