The Social Life of Bats
The 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.”
Since we arrived at the tower during the daylight hours, I had expected the nocturnal mammals to be asleep. Instead, they were shaking
