Pressing week, the last full week of October, is when the bats of Hollowmere Orchard become a household matter. The apples are in, the cider lofts smell of fermenting pulp, and every loft and eave fills with small brown bodies that have come in from the fields to crowd together. The naturalist has taken three accounts of them in that week and sets them side by side. Mirren Oake runs the press at Tolley Ridge. She says the bats are tidy and the people are not. Every night of pressing she sets a pierced-tin lantern on the porch rail, and every morning she sweeps the clipped moth wings from beneath it into a dustpan. The bats take the moths at the lantern and let the wings drop, so the heap under the rail is the surest way to learn that they are about. Her one rule is that nobody sweeps the loft floor until the last bat has gone out. The droppings go on the quince bed afterward. She does not like them in the loft, and she does not like the quinces without them.
Matthias Crewe keeps the old tower loft above the Jarrett Fell chapel, and his complaints are smaller. A bat of his, he says, hangs from the third rafter and nowhere else. When a younger bat takes that rafter, the owner hovers beneath it and scolds in a thin, dry click until the younger one moves. Then it climbs up and spends several minutes grooming each wing, finger by finger, before it will go out for the evening. He has watched this every dusk for nine autumns. He says it is the only reliable thing in the building, and he admits the bat has never once got the rafter wrong.
Mabel Ashby, who is eleven and picks windfalls at Tolley Ridge, has the sharpest eye. She noticed that one bat in the porch rafters has a smudge of ink on the tip of its left ear, as if it had been caught leaning on a wet page. It does carry itself like a clerk who is certain the others are doing it wrong. Its ears are nearly as tall as its head and often point in different directions. It has a pug nose, a rust-orange ruff at the neck like frost on a dry leaf, and amber eyes that give a sideways, put-upon squint. Mabel says it tolerates the lantern but not the cat. The cat has been told.
The three accounts agree on the points that can be checked. The bat is polite when left alone, fussy when crowded, and wholly occupied with moths, midges and the cider flies that rise from the pulp. It is not dangerous. In flight, the brown-violet wings open like two small umbrellas, and the lantern light comes through them in tiny stars. Mirren's measuring stick, held to one against the cider-house door, gave fourteen inches tip to tip, on a body no bigger than a plum.
- Classification
- Small winged dusk hunter
- Habitat
- Belfries, cider lofts, orchard eaves
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 14 in. wingspan, plum-sized body
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Dusk orchards and village rooftops
- Binomial
- Vespertilio lanternarum
- Diet
- Moths, midges, cider flies
- Temperament
- Fussy, crowded, mostly polite