Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 66
dictionary of the calls of the bats who live in the abandoned tower—Hipposideros caffer aka Sundevall’s leafnosed bats—as well as those of the Egyptian whispering
bat, Nycteris thebaica, who live in a semi-hollow tree in
the sand forest inside the Gorongosa boundaries.
A few days after our excursion to the bat colony,
Naskrecki showed me how he manipulated the squiggly waveforms on a large screen in his office until the
clicks and hisses started to sound like chirping birds.
One call of four staccato chirps stood out. “This is just
a lonely male calling,” Naskrecki said. To correlate the
call to the action, and infer its meaning, Naskrecki and
Huó also conduct experiments in the lab by bringing
bats from the colony into a controlled environment, to
see if they make the same calls.
That morning they had brought back a tiny male
bat that could fit in the palm of a human hand. It was
afternoon and Huó was trying to tempt it to eat fresh
meal worms and moths in a room across the hall from
Naskrecki’s office. But the little guy was refusing.
Maybe the room was too loud or too bright. Maybe it
was stressed out by the big human (a monster to the
TIME TO FLY A bat flees its roost in an abandoned
concrete structure in Mozambique, which may have
been a water tower on an erstwhile cotton factory.
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