Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 61
ZO OLOGY
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goroNgosA sPeciAl
the social life of Bats
They sing, have dialects, reserve special tones for their pups—our reporter
journeys to Mozambique to explore the unique communication of bats
BY JORI LEWIS
P H OTO S BY P IOTR NAS KRECKI
T
HE SQUAT ABANDONED CONCRETE STRUCTURE may have
been a water tower when this tract of land in the
grasslands of Mozambique was a cotton factory. Now
it served an entirely different purpose: Housing a
bat colony.
To climb through the building’s low opening, bat researcher Césaria Huó and I had to
battle a swarm of biting tsetse flies and clear
away a layer of leaves and vines. My eyes
quickly adjusted to the low light, but my
nose, even behind a mask, couldn’t adjust
to the smell of hundreds of bats and layers
of bat guano—a fetid reek of urea
with fishy, spicy overtones. But Huó
had a different reaction. “I don’t
mind the smell now,” she said. After
several months of monitoring bat
colonies in the Gorongosa National
Park area as a master’s student in the
park’s conservation biology program, Huó said
she almost likes it. “Now, when I smell it, I know
there are bats here.”
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