glass in the front door, Olivia answered, “Your dad will take you there after we see the bat woman—whoops!” Blushing, she said, “Now you’ve got me doing it, Sammy. I hope I don’t call her that by mistake—it would be an embarrassing way to meet her. Anyway, after you kids and your dad leave Dr. Rhodes’s office, I’ll stay with her to learn more about the bats.”
“So let’s get started,” Steven suggested, leaning across Olivia to push the door wide. While he held it open, the three short ones—Olivia, Ashley, and Sam walked under Steven’s extended arm into the corridor. Jack was now too tall to fit under his father’s arm, and he liked that. With every inch he grew, he felt a bit more grown-up. He figured that one of these years he might actually outgrow his father, who was nearly six feet four.
“Come in, come in!” Dr. Rhodes welcomed them. For a world expert, she had a small office, Jack thought, and only three chairs.
“The kids can sit on the floor,” Steven quickly offered. “These two are our kids—Jack and Ashley—and Sam Sexton is our guest.”
Guest. That was the word the Landons liked to use for the short-term foster kids who stayed with them from time to time, kids who needed a safe place to live until their problems could be solved.
“Pleased to m-meet you,” Sam said, hardly stuttering as he took the hand Dr. Rhodes held out to him.
“How are you, Sam?” Smiling warmly, Dr. Rhodes told him, “You sit here, closest to my chair, so you’ll have the best look at the pictures I’m going to show everyone.” Jack wondered whether his mother had clued Dr. Rhodes in on Sam’s background. Or maybe Dr. Rhodes was just naturally nice to small kids.
“Well,” she said, “let’s start. Your mom said you wanted to hear about bats. The first things I’m going to tell you are what bats are not!” She laughed a little, then went on, “They’re not birds, and they’re not blind, although they are color-blind. They don’t get tangled in people’s hair, and they don’t suck blood—well, actually, three species do drink blood, but those species don’t live anywhere near here.”
Ashley’s hand flew to her neck. “Where do they live?” she asked quickly.
“In our hemisphere, they’re in Mexico, Central America, and South America. But less than one percent of the world’s bats are vampire bats, and two of the vampire bat species feed only on birds. The third species prefers mammals, but Ashley, you don’t have to worry about your neck. They’re more likely to go after your toes.”
Sammy’s eyes had grown wide.
“Nothing to be afraid of, Sam,” Dr. Rhodes told him. “The Mexican free-tailed bats, the kind we mostly have around here, eat only bugs.” She held up a picture of a brown, fuzzy bat with hooded eyes, rounded ears, and wings folded like fans. “They’re wonderful animals. To me, they look like little gnomes. They’re mammals, you know, which means the mothers nurse their pups—that’s what the babies are called. Pups. Did you know that?”
All three kids shook their heads. “So now there are three animals I know of that have pups,” Ashley announced. “Dogs, wolves, and bats. I learned about the wolves in Yellowstone National Park.”
Jack got a mental image of a gnomelike mamma bat with her wings wrapped around a little gnome-faced pup. “How do the mothers hold them?” he asked. “I mean, they hang upside down, don’t they? How do they keep from dropping the pups?”
Dr. Rhodes answered, “It’s the babies that hold on to the mother, with their feet and their thumbs and their tiny teeth. Like you kids, little bats lose their baby teeth after a while and get grown-up teeth. When the mothers leave to get their nightly meal of insects, the baby bats hang by their toes on the walls and ceilings of the caves, packed so tightly together that there can be 400 of them in a one-square-foot area. Think of that.” Dr. Rhodes opened her desk drawer and took out a ruler. “Twelve inches on each side of a square, and 400 bat babies all squeezed together into that little space. That closeness keeps them warm, because a cave is kind of cold.” She threw the ruler back into the drawer, then held up another photo that showed bats clustered together so tightly they looked like ink blots on a gray cave ceiling.
“Wow!” Ashley exclaimed. “How do the mothers ever find their babies in all that crowd?”
“Good question, Ashley. By smell and by sound. Even though a hundred thousand pups get born in the spring, a mother can pick out her own infant—she has only one baby a year. Both mother and pup make these high-pitched sounds that people can’t hear but the bats can. It guides them to each other. That same high-frequency echolocation guides them when they go outside the cave, too. It tells them where the insects are.”
Dr. Rhodes winced a little, then reached down to pick up an empty wastebasket. After she turned it upside down, she carefully placed her left foot on top of it. An elastic bandage had been wrapped around her ankle. “A sprain,” she explained when she saw the Landons looking at it. “I tried to take a shortcut down a slippery slope, and I twisted my ankle.”
“Does it hurt?” Olivia asked. “Yes, of course it must hurt. The kids shouldn’t be taking up any more of your time, Dr. Rhodes.”
“Oh, it doesn’t hurt me that much,” she answered. “It’s fun to talk to kids; I enjoy it. Anyway, I’ll just end this little session with a few more bat facts. Like this one—bats’ knees bend backward, not forward like yours.” She pointed to Sam, whose knees were tucked under his chin. Ashley looked thoughtfully at her own knees, probably wondering how it would feel if they bent backward.
“And bats have been around for 50 million years,” Dr. Rhodes went on. “We know that from finding fossils that old. But most of all, I want you to remember that bats are intelligent creatures and tremendously useful ecologically. If there are 400,000 bats flying out of Carlsbad Cavern every night eating bugs, can you imagine how many tons of bugs that makes in a month? In a year?
That’s a tremendous help to farmers.”
“How much can each bat eat?” Jack asked.
“Considering the size of a bat, quite a lot. A nursing female will leave her baby tucked nice and warm with the other pups in the ‘bat nursery,’ then fly out into the night to eat her entire body weight—about 12 or 13 grams—in insects. Then she’ll return to her baby, nurse it again, and maybe fly out a second time in a single night to eat that many bugs all over again. Then back to her baby. She never leaves her baby for long. She’s a gentle, caring mother.”
Sam, who’d seemed fascinated by Dr. Rhodes’s lesson, suddenly looked as though he were about to cry. Maybe it was the mention of “a gentle, caring mother,” which Sam didn’t have. Steven must have noticed Sam’s sad expression too, because he stood up and said, “I guess we’d better get going. I told the kids I’d take them into the cavern. Sammy’s really anxious to see Left Hand Tunnel.”
“Left Hand Tunnel? Two different species of bats live there,” Dr. Rhodes said, “the cave myotis and the fringed myotis. Both species are quite rare. We’ve counted only 354 of the cave myotis and only 12 of the fringed myotis.”
Well, Jack thought, at least that particular tunnel wouldn’t be teeming with countless thousands of bats. He felt a little relieved.
“I hope I get to see those rare bats,” Steven told her. “I’m really anxious to shoot some pictures like the ones you just showed us.”
“Steven is a photographer,” Olivia
