>Date: Fri, 02 Jan 1998 09:48:39 -0500
>To: [log in to unmask]
>From: "Hilary L. Hopper" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Combat Gear on Bats
>
>Bats...well I have returned from Christmas to find a whole hell of a lot of
bullamanka talk on my email so I can't stand it any longer, I will begin to
tell you bat stories from Kentucky. Once about five years ago, we (about
sixteen people) were crawling through an intestinally-complex part of the
lower bowels of the Sloan's Valley Cave System (officially termed the Lower
Spahgetti area) Muddy...it was, and tight, low and wet.
>        I had my battery pack on the back of my belt and in the really low
spots it scraped on the ceiling and occasionally added to my incipient
claustrophobia by holding me in place as we oozed and grunted and cursed our
way along. Anyway we came to a slightly higher area and there was a bat all
tight up against the ceiling snoozing away. And I wriggled in the wrong
direction while passing it and SCRAPED IT OFF THE CEILING WITH MY BATTERY
PACK. This is one of the most terrible things I have done in my life,
friends, since quitting drinking, let me tell you what.
>        I did not know what to do. It lay next to me breathing gently. I
called back to the next person (right behind me, we were butt to butt, all
of us) that I had done this foul deed and he said he would look at it. Later
out of the tight area he (a very strange and apparently pathetic man, shy,
maybe mentally ill, but a painter of weird cave scenes and very much in tune
with bats) told me that he had picked the poor sqeaking thing out of the mud
and placed it on a ledge next to the crawlway so that it could recover. And
indeed when we returned past that point, hours later and all the more
miserably, it had made its escape from this horrible human interstate where
it had hoped to have its long winters nap. Of course the common wisdom is
that, by waking it in midwinter, we had condemned it to death, becos bats
need to eat a lot in order to resume their deep sleep, and there is nothing
to eat in midwinter.
>        And thus we enter realms of environmental struggle between cavers
and thos who protect caves .... we have been asked to stay out of all caves
this winter on the off chance that there may be a bat in it somewhere that
we could disturb. Argh!
>Argh!
>Argh!
>Darn that Nature Conservancy!
>Wackos and extremists!
>
>--- Hilary Lambert Hopper, your geographer friend in Kentucky
>
>At 10:17 PM 12/22/97 -0500, you wrote:
>>sbmarcus wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> One of the advantages of living in Maine. Very few professions require any
>>> kind of certification or licensing.
>>>
>>
>>Of those that do require certification, how many require that one be
>>acquainted with bats?  And where is one required to house his/her bats?
>>
>>-jc
>>
>>
>