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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
A lifetime of adventures with bats around the world reveals why these special and imperiled creatures should be protected rather than feared.
From menacing moonshiners and armed bandits to charging elephants and man-eating tigers, Merlin Tuttle has stopped at nothing to find and protect bats on every continent they inhabit. Enamored of bats ever since discovering a colony in a cave as a boy, Tuttle saw how effective photography could be in persuading people not to fear bats, and he has spent his career traveling the world to document them.
Few people realize how sophisticated and intelligent bats are. Tuttle shares research showing that frog-eating bats can identify frogs by their calls, that vampire bats have a social order similar to that of primates, and that bats have remarkable memories. Bats also provide enormous benefits by eating crop pests, pollinating plants, and carrying seeds needed for reforestation. They save farmers billions of dollars annually and are essential to a healthy planet.
Sharing highlights from a lifetime of adventure and discovery, Tuttle takes us to the frontiers of bat research and conservation and forever changes the way we see these poorly understood yet fascinating creatures.
Author Notes
Dr. MERLIN TUTTLE is an ecologist, wildlife photographer, and conservationist who has studied bats worldwide for more than fifty years. He founded Bat Conservation International in 1982. His work has been featured in Science , the Wall Street Journal , The New Yorker , and National Geographic .
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Tuttle, the founder of Bat Conservation International, sets out to motivate readers to care about conservation in this enjoyable collection of career travelogue stories. Hoping that having some fun and presenting good information to readers will work some magic, he describes the grandeur of bat communities discovered deep in secluded caves, recalls bat-related encounters with moonshiners and witch doctors, and shares stories of conservation successes. Tuttle really shines in his delightful accounts of complicated, risky, and expensive expeditions and creative efforts dedicated to getting the perfect nature photo. It can take 10,000 shots to get a single publishable image that shows a desired animal behavior, but that's the kind of image that Tuttle believes is critical to turn fear of bats into understanding. He details taming fragile bats to feed them by hand, getting ammonia poisoning from guano fumes while documenting massive colonies of freetailed bats, and creating a hotel room studio with furniture replaced by rainforest plants to create the impression of a shot taken high in the forest canopy. Tuttle shares his drive to document the creatures he loves with subtle humor and contagious, unsubtle passion. 40 color photos. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Anyone who has ever seen one of Merlin Tuttle's crystal-clear photographs of bats is familiar with him, even if they don't know his name. In this new memoir-cum-love-note to the Chiroptera, Tuttle tells of how he became enamored of bats at age 17 by climbing into a cave full of roosting gray myotises (a small, insect-eating bat) and discovering how gentle they were. Though he met his share of moonshiners and politicians who were skeptical of the value of bats, through his research as a graduate student he helped convince the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the gray myotis as endangered. This helped stop needless destruction of their maternity colonies in caves. As he began to study bats all over the world, he also served tirelessly as their advocate, convincing farmers, landowners, and city dwellers that bats are beneficial members of their local ecosystems. But it was when he discovered that no one had ever produced good photographs of bats exhibiting their natural behaviors that a conservation star was born, for it was through Tuttle's beautiful bat photographs that the general public, via the aegis of National Geographic and countless books, discovered how cool and cute! bats could be. Tuttle's tales of stalking bats, and of the discoveries he and fellow researchers have made, will make bat lovers out of every reader.--Bent, Nancy Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE WORLD FEELS extraordinarily full of woe. Signals of climate peril, affecting everything from the tiniest bees to the tallest trees, are intensifying. Temperatures climb. Polar icecaps melt. Species crash. Where to turn for comfort, much less optimism? A few years ago the Danes offered a therapy for stress called hygge, a concept that gave us any excuse to drape ourselves in blankets, nestle into armchairs and enjoy the beneficence of cozy moments. This winter, Japan exports its balm for battered souls: shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. In his reassuring and nicely illustrated guide, forest BATHING: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness (Viking, $20), Dr. Qing Li, chairman of the Japanese Society for Forest Medicine, prescribes an exercise akin to sunbathing or seabathing, but among the pines. This isn't any mundane walk in the woods; fnstagramming prohibited, please. Move deliberately. String a hammock between cedars. Better yet, sprawl on the moss and let the weight of your body sink onto the earth. Try not to worry about ticks. Li offers "a wealth of data that proves" that shinrin-yoku can reduce blood pressure, stress and blood-sugar levels. 1 was pleased to learn about phytoncides, the natural oils that trees release "to protect them from bacteria, insects and fungi." As "part of the communication pathway between trees," they also provide a boost to the human immune system; try a diffuser sprinkled with hinoki cypress oil if you're housebound this winter. Yoshifumi Miyazaki, a professor at Chiba University in Japan and author Of SHINRIN VOKU: The Japanese Art of Forest Bathing (Timber, $16.95), shares test results of forest therapy on men with high blood pressure (why must it always be men?), office workers and "mature" women (ah, there we are). A companion volume, the handsome among trees: a Guided Journal for Forest Bathing (Timber, $18.95), contains excursion logs and instructions to "count the various shades of green." Friendly enough, but the bossiness may thwart that aimless spirit. In these books, Japanese forests look open and pristine; pine needles pad the ground invitingly. The forests of my longing are more Germanic in sensibility: shadowy, disconcerting places echoing with the voices of Grimm's fairy tales. They raise the blood pressure. At times it feels best to skip the forest and instead see the trees - each in its unique glory. AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 TREES (Laurence King, $24.99) is an exquisite way to do just that. Beautiful illustrations by the French artist Lucille Clerc, strewn generously throughout, have the limpid calm of vernal pools. The book's author, Jonathan Drori, whose sunny prose sparkles with authority, grew up near the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where he later served as a trustee. His childhood passion for plants branched into a study of the ways humans and trees interact. Drori and Clerc's book abounds with discoveries. The London plane trees that line many of the city's squares have adapted well to polluted air; their bark "drops off in flakes the size of a baby's hand," sloughing away layers of grime to unclog pores that allow the exchange of gases, leaving behind the trunk's characteristic army-camouflage pattern. Leyland cypresses owe their popularity to issues of privacy, class and property rights; in 1990s London, strife over these hedges was responsible for a suicide and at least two murders. Moroccan goats climb into the branches of the argan tree to munch on its fruit, the size of a small plum, which protects one or two small oil-rich seeds. In Japan, the Chinese lacquer tree gave rise to a cult of assisted suicide among monks hoping to achieve Buddhahood. Vajragupta's seductive WILD AWAKE: Alone, Offline & Aware in Nature (Windhorse, paper, $12.95) might inspire you to drop everything and tramp across the fens. Or nestle into your pillows with this lucid, thoughtful and important memoir, setting off on a journey into stillness and contentment. Ordained into a Buddhist order in 1994, Vajragupta began a practice of annual solitary retreats, over decades, beginning in a caravan by the sea in Wales. There he found "sorry-looking sheep, wind-slanted gorse, wind-stunted ash." And "a whole new person I had never really met before - me." In Spain and Scotland, across Cornwall and Cumbria, Vajragupta muses, in tussocky swales of sentences, on the yellow-eyed glare of a sparrow hawk, "a dark tarn full of tadpoles," the glisten of tens of thousands of pale-pink jellyfish washed up on a beach. All is not silent: One dark night, a huge boulder breaks off and slides down an escarpment, stopping miraculously short of crushing his cabin. All is not sitting, either, though the retreats began as a way of prolonging meditation, practicing "disciplined idleness." Vajragupta begins to walk farther and farther, confronting his fear of being lost, meeting his own wildness, until the walks themselves become the meditation. He walks to mourn the death of his father, walks both to quiet and enliven his mind. And he becomes "astonished by how alive" the places he visits are. He urges us to imagine the lives of other creatures as best we can, "to be intimate with all things," as a Zen master put it. Your blood pressure may rise within days of emerging from your forest bath, but Vajragupta demonstrates that the muscles of resilience - and the habits of regeneration - exercised through a sustained, empathic mingling with the natural world will serve you for a lifetime. "It was a matter of love," Vajragupta says. Learning to empathize feels necessary - for the sake of nature too. That's the message from Merlin Ttittle, the founder of Bat Conservation International. This new edition of his 2015 book, THE SECRET LIVES OF BATS: My Adventures With the World's Most Misunderstood Mammals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, paper, $15.99), is proof that teenage passion can change the world. One autumn in Austin, Tex., in the mid-1980s, more than a million Brazilian free-tailed bats moved into crevices under a bridge near the State Capitol. People panicked and called for the bats' extermination. Never mind that they could consume 15 tons of insects nightly. Alarmed by the headlines, Ttittle resigned his position with the Milwaukee Public Museum and moved to Texas to rescue the bats, meeting with city officials to convince them that "bats make wonderful neighbors." Within a few years, the mayor announced that Austin was the bat capital of America; the bats now bring in 12 million tourist dollars every summer. Over the course of 50 years of studying bats, from Tennessee to Thailand, Ttittle engineered many more such conversions from revulsion to devotion. Nowadays, architects design special bridges and houses to accommodate urban bats. Tuttle and his father, a high school biology teacher, began exploring caves in his hometown near Knoxville, Tenn. The teenager, armed with field notes, persuaded his mother to drive him all the way to the Smithsonian to meet with scientists - without an appointment - who might teach him more about the gray myotis, whose migratory patterns entranced him. In that magical way of great love affairs, he met the man who would later become his mentor. Grad-school spelunking in dangerous terrain meant confrontations with angry bulls and suspicious moonshiners; caves were often full of illegal stills guarded by armed outlaws. He befriended some of them; one man in his late 20 s, the same age as Ttittle, had eight children and lived in two bedrooms, but, intrigued by the bat man, he welcomed him at his dinner table and gave him safe passage. Bat populations were crashing across the country. Ttittle's beloved gray myotis was in such severe decline by the late 1960s that experts predicted its extinction. Ttittle didn't expect people to find his bats cute, nor did he think many would take the time to learn their creature habits. Instead, he took a pragmatic approach to converting enemies into allies, demonstrating the bats' usefulness. One potato farmer, who owned property with an important nursery cave, agreed to let Tuttle explore if he killed the bats. Instead, Tuttle showed him the discarded wing covers of potato beetles eaten by the bats on their way home. "Your colony may eat up to a hundred pounds of insects in a single night," he told the stunned farmer, who figured his bats were "worth more than five dollars apiece" in savings on insecticides - and decided to protect them. Bats, some of which can live 30 years or more, provide free pollination and insect control services. They have social structures resembling those of elephants, dolphins and humans. They share information and visit friends. They cuddle and play, wrapping one another in winged hugs. Females generally give birth to only one pup, and some, like the vampire bat, nurse their young for up to nine months. Those vampire bats also "practice reciprocal altruism," becoming "most generous to those who have helped them in the past, a trait that is rare beyond humans, chimpanzees and wild dogs." Ttittle has worked through periods when things seemed hopeless; even today, the outlook for some bats is uncertain. They continue to be hunted and poisoned. They're also threatened by carelessly operated wind energy facilities, a problem Ttittle hopes to solve with actions as simple as reprogramming computers to activate turbines at different times. Bats are beset by fatal fungal diseases and maligned by "exaggerated claims that they are sources of so-called emerging diseases," which are quite rare. But Ttittle takes cheer, as should we, in watching as bat research becomes one of "biology's most exciting frontiers." Bees also "need our curiosity," as Thor Hanson puts it in the vividly zinging BUZZ: The Nature and Necessity of Bees (Basic Books, $27). They have an image problem, since they "do not hide their otherness." Too many of us are put off by the creepiness of their exoskeletons - never mind their sting. My grandson is obsessed with an animated series about trucks from Korea, "Robocar Poli"; when a truck dislodges a hive, bees swarm angrily onto the face of the trucks' beloved young dispatcher. If you've never witnessed the revolted, full-body shudder of a 2-year-old, I can assure you it's a fearsome thing. And yet "no other group of insects has grown so close to us, none is more essential, and none is more revered" than the bee. Hanson, who lives on a forested island in the Pacific Northwest, zips and waggles through fascinating journeys to meet fellow bee obsessives, reminding us that here, again, we have brought trouble upon ourselves: 40 percent of bee species are in decline or threatened with extinction. We tag along as he visits the impressively levelheaded Diana Cox-Foster of the United States Department of Agriculture's "Bee Lab" at Utah State University, who warns us off easy answers, pointing to the four P's: parasites, poor nutrition, pesticides and pathogens. We spray vast acres of golf courses and farmland with poisons. We move to the country, but we want it to look suburban, so we rip out those messy but vital hedgerows filled with pollen-rich weeds - bee food. Scientists are still finding traces of DDT on pollen, though it was banned decades ago. The problem, she points out, may not be as simple as eliminating one pesticide; chemical cocktails synergize, enhancing their effects in combination. But products are tested and evaluated only in isolation. Books about forest bathing - and trees "talking" to one another through chemical signals - are signs of a resurgent strain of romanticism, even mysticism, in our feelings about nature. Wishful, perhaps. But given the urgency of our problems, the bat and bee (and other) protectors resort to a pragmatic approach that will sound crass to tender ideologues: Invest in nature not because we cherish it, but because it returns a monetary profit. Our almond industry tells a tale of degradation - and tentative reparation. California's Central Valley now supplies 81 percent of the world's annual almond harvest; in that region alone, 940,000 acres are under cultivation. Beneath the trees, "a powdery brown moonscape of bare soil" is mowed and sprayed with poisons so fallen nuts can be efficiently vacuumed up, obliterating the native bees' habitat. The cost of trucking bees in to pollinate the trees is soaring. Bees aren't always available. They're stressed by their commute, overworked, malnourished. Their hives are vulnerable to theft. One promising solution, promoted by Xerces, the only major nonprofit in North America devoted to saving insects, has been to reintroduce hedgerows and manage native bee habitat so that pollination can be done the oldfashioned way - for free. The idea is catching on, with General Mills now mandating that almond suppliers "incorporate pollinator conservation into their production stream." Results are immediate; it turns out bees respond rapidly even to small changes. OUR NATIVE BEES: North America's Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them (Timber, $25.95) takes a tighter flight path through overwhelming amounts of information. It annoys its author, Paige Embry - rightly - that most people know next to nothing about the 4,000 species of native bees nesting in the ground, in trees and in the sides of our houses. They get lots of close-ups here. Embry's prose is clear and crisp. Her habit of attention began with the tomatoes of her Georgia childhood, which, she later learned, need those native bees to shake the pollen off the plants. So what about all that tasty stuff the bees and bats take care of - if we let them? In the late 1980s, Eliot Coleman modestly launched a revolution in the organic farming that keeps such tiny wildlife humming and buzzing, the NEW ORGANIC GROWER: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener (Chelsea Green, paper, $29.95) has been updated for its 30th anniversary edition; it remains as relevant as ever. Coleman urges small landowners to ramp up productivity by avoiding pesticides, tending compost piles and sticking to two-acre farms - "more than sufficient land to grow a year's worth of vegetables for 100 people." Tilling the soil in Maine, he has pioneered dead-of-winter growing techniques and designed new tools to make production more efficient. Soil health, bee health, human health: We are braided in dependency. The loss of beloved creatures may leave us at a loss for words - and a loss of words too. A decade ago, a close observer of the Oxford Junior Dictionary noticed that 40 words concerning nature had been dropped from a new edition, no longer used by enough children to warrant inclusion: acorn, dandelion, fern, newt, heron, otter, willow. All gone, replaced by words like blog, broadband, bulletpoint and voice mail. What a dismal state of affairs, one that tugged at Robert Macfarlane, the British author of the spellbinding "Landmarks," and Jackie Morris, a magisterial illustrator and the author of several classic children's books. In the lost words (Anansi, $35), the duo conjures the crackly gorgeousness of "heather," the rooty charm of "dandelion," the dignity of "newt" - though minute, "we're kings of the pond, lions of the duckweed, dragons of the water." Every page is enthralling. Even as hate is on the rise, I like to think - no, I need to think-that its opposite will win out. That everyday acts of cherishment, whether of bees or bats or weeds or words, will save us. However, it's increasingly clear that love, while an endlessly renewable source of energy, is necessary - but not sufficient. Thankfully, there are many among us who can harness that energy, heeding even the tiniest cries for help, and think creatively about what's to be done. They roll up their sleeves and get to work. That's where we find hope. And that kind of work may be the best therapy for all concerned. dominique browning, formerly the editor of House & Garden, is the founder and director of Moms Clean Air Force. She works at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Kirkus Review
Bats are "sophisticated, beautiful, even cute, quite aside from their crucial roles as primary predators of insects, pollinators of flowers and dispersers of seeds," writes Tuttle, an ecologist who has championed their cause for more than 50 years. The author's cover stories and photographs have been featured in National Geographic and other magazines, and he has traveled the globe to study bats in their natural cave habitats, risking his life in the process. After obtaining a doctorate in bat biology, Tuttle worked as the curator of the Milwaukee Public Museum. In 1982, he resigned and founded the advocacy organization Bat Conservation International to enlist support for these much-maligned mammals that are in danger of becoming an endangered species. Bats are wrongly accused of destroying crops and spreading diseases such as rabies, and they are confused with their mythical blood-sucking namesakes. Tuttle sets the record straight, showing the important role bats play in pest control and their potential boom for farmers. "A single bat could catch thousands of insects in just one hour," he writes. "Bats ha[ve] a far better record of living safely with humans than even our beloved dogs, andthey also play essential roles in supporting human economies." Using implanted microchips to track their behavior, scientists have established that certain bats are comparable to elephants in their ability to maintain complex social relationships. They have highly sophisticated hunting practices and are altruistic within their groups. Tuttle notes that it is not unusual to find as many as 100,000 bats clustered together hibernating. His fascination with them began when he was 12 and he observed them in a cave near his Tennessee home. Encouraged by his father, who was a botanist, he explored the local caves where bats hibernated and studied their migratory behavior. Tuttle's recent attempts to photograph them in their natural habitat have led him through many hair-raising adventures, which he entertainingly chronicles. A page-turning memoir of curiosity aboutand dedication toa significant part of the natural world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Teenage Discoveries I've always been fascinated by nature, so when, at age 17, I discovered thousands of gray bats, now referred to as gray myotis, doing things that, according to books of the day, they weren't supposed to do, I was immediately intrigued. It all began in April 1959 when a high school acquaintance told me about a bat cave near my home west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Baloney Cave was named for its baloney-shaped formations, and it was said to sometimes shelter thousands of bats. The next weekend, I easily persuaded my father, who was always open for new adventure, to help me find it. We headed out on a beautiful spring afternoon. The sun was bright and the air was scented with honeysuckle blossoms as we followed a barely visible trail along a fence, then into the shade of stately old oak and hickory trees. A half-mile later, we found ourselves staring into a gaping pit about 12 feet in diameter at the top, sloping down like an antlion funnel. Limestone walls adorned in moss and ferns dripped from recent showers. This clearly was the cave my friend had described. Wondering if the bats would still be there, we carefully climbed down into the cooler entrance, jumping the last few feet to the floor. Before venturing into the dark interior, we retrieved our new miner's caps and carbide lamps from our knapsacks and added fuel. Each lamp included an upper and a lower chamber. We added quarter-inch chunks of carbide into the lower ones and poured water into the upper ones. When water contacts carbide it produces acetylene gas. And when the gas exits through a tiny nozzle in the middle of a shiny, metal reflector, it can be lit with a spark from an embedded flint. This provided each of us with a half-inch flame for light. We could alter the brightness by adjusting a lever, which controlled the rate at which water dripped onto the carbide. Even at their brightest, these lamps were dim compared to today's LED lights, but they were the best we had. After allowing our eyes to adjust to the yellowish glow of our lamps, we began to look around, first noticing a room the size of a small bedroom on our left. It was strewn with old moonshine still paraphernalia, broken Mason jars, and parts of wooden barrels. The ceiling was smoke-blackened from the distilling process. Far more concerned about finding bats, we would later regret having assumed that moonshine stills in Baloney Cave were limited to the far distant past. This was our first venture into a cave. My father led the way, as we stepped carefully around slick spots on an uneven floor, our hands often supporting us against the moist limestone walls. After going by several side passages, my father exclaimed, "Wow! Look at this." We were just entering a room the size of a two-car garage, which our dim lights barely covered. Along one side, baloney-shaped formations ran down a wall into a pit; because the bottom was beyond the reach of our lights, it seemed endlessly deep. "I sure hope the bats don't live beyond that," I commented, pointing into the chasm. So far, we hadn't seen any bats, though the cave floor was often strewn with a soft, dry accumulation of old droppings, commonly called guano. Although we were a little nervous about becoming lost, we decided to search the side passages. Some were quite narrow, requiring tight squeezes. My father finally suggested we return to the entrance and try to follow the most recent bat droppings like a proverbial trail of bread crumbs. As we were beginning again, we noticed a big difference between bat and rodent droppings. Bat droppings were similar to mouse pellets, about a quarter-inch long by less than an eighth-inch wide. However, unlike those of deer mice and pack rats, which also frequent caves, once bat droppings dried, they easily crumbled into dozens of tiny fragments that reflected our lamps' light in a rainbow of colors. The reflections came from tiny bits of insects the bats had eaten. Rodent droppings were composed mostly of plant material; they were hardened like bits of gravel and failed to reflect light. By following only the freshest trail of evidence, we were able to move ahead with much greater confidence. A few minutes later, through a small hole in a wall, I heard my first chittering bats. On the far side of a small room, I could barely make out a furry mat of several thousand gray myotis covering the ceiling. They apparently had heard us coming and were rapidly waking up. Clutching my butterfly net in one hand, I desperately attempted to scramble through the hole in time to catch a few before they could escape, but to no avail. Suddenly the air was virtually saturated with flying bats. Dozens were landing on my head and shoulders, because I was inadvertently blocking their escape. They were crawling down my neck and into my shirt sleeves -- no need for a net! But I soon realized that they meant no harm and were only seeking places to hide. In fact, they had far more to fear than I did. This was my first lesson in the gentle nature of bats, especially those that form large colonies. They neither scratched nor bit me as they swarmed over me, though I did have to hold quite still in order to avoid inadvertently crushing them. When the pandemonium finally cleared, my father helped me retreat from the hole clutching a couple of struggling specimens, which we gently placed in a cloth bag. Back at the cave entrance, we got out my father's Peterson Field Guide to Mammals to identify our bats. Based on their unicolor gray fur, we easily identified them as gray myotis ( Myotis grisescens ). All other cave-dwelling bats of North America have bi- or tricolored fur -- that is, each hair has a dark base and lighter tip or is banded dark, light, and darker from base to tip. Curious to see how many bats would emerge to feed that evening, we waited in the cave entrance. The first individuals left about a half-hour after sunset, followed by a steady stream of thousands. We sat quietly, listening to the flutter of wings, which sometimes passed within inches of our faces. I was enthralled. Where were they going, and when would they return? Several nights later, when we brought my mother back to see these bats emerge, we had a big disappointment. The few books of the time that mentioned gray myotis stated that they lived in a single cave year-round. Nevertheless, ours had disappeared. Speculating that perhaps gray myotis just didn't come out every night, we returned repeatedly to check their roosting area and watch for emergences at the entrance. But they were gone. They returned in September, then mysteriously disappeared again. Had they gone somewhere else for the winter? I was determined to find out. With help from my father and some high school friends, I thoroughly explored even the innermost reaches of Baloney Cave on the chance that our bats had simply found a remote area where they could hibernate undisturbed. But we found no sign of them. When our bats briefly returned and left again the following spring, I was convinced they must be migrating, despite books I'd read that said they didn't migrate. Armed with field notes, documenting when the bats were present versus absent, and two museum-type voucher specimens to substantiate my identification, I convinced my mother to drive me to Washington, D.C., so I could meet with scientists at the Smithsonian's Division of Mammals. Excerpted from The Secret Lives of Bats: My Adventures with the World's Most Misunderstood Mammals by Merlin Tuttle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Preface: A City That Loves Bats | p. ix |
Acknowledgments | p. xiii |
1 Teenage Discoveries | p. 1 |
2 Saving the Gray Myotis | p. 20 |
3 Tracking Bat Nightlife | p. 43 |
4 Investigating Vampire Bats | p. 58 |
5 Bats Through a Camera's Eye | p. 73 |
6 Discovering Frog-Eating Bats | p. 92 |
7 Finding America's Most Elusive Bats | p. 112 |
8 Cacti That Compete for Bats | p. 128 |
9 Free-Tailed Bat Caves and Crop Pests | p. 138 |
10 African Adventures | p. 158 |
11 Bat-Loving Monks, Tigers, and Poachers | p. 173 |
12 Mysteries of Bat-Guiding Flowers | p. 197 |
13 Bat Foresters | p. 219 |
14 Fruit Grower Complaints | p. 229 |
15 A National Park for Bats | p. 235 |
Epilogue: Hope for the Future | p. 243 |
Bibliography | p. 252 |
Index | p. 264 |