In Ireland, folklore holds that if a bat enters your house, there will be a death soon thereafter. Once, when we were kids in Lucan, a bat flew into my little brother’s window and frightened the bejeesus out of him. My brother, however, despite his lack of bejeesuses, survived, thus rendering the myth obsolete. The myth, though, does tap into a long-held cultural misunderstanding about the bat. Dubliner Bram Stoker didn’t do them any favours when he decided that his literary Dracula could morph into a vampire bat, thus doing for the species what the Jaws novel did for sharks.
The negative view of bats, however, isn’t a good thing for either ourselves or for the bats. There are fewer bats around Lucan today than there were in the 1980s when I was growing up. Our housing estates and shopping centres have encroached into habitats in which bats have lived for centuries. The bats, though fewer in number, are still here, having eked out small, protected wild islands in our suburban sprawl. It’s time that we in Lucan find ways to be good neighbours, and so, to that end, for this weeks’ ramble, my daughter and I joined the Society for Old Lucan to participate in a bat census at the ruins of St. Finian’s Church.
Before rambling, however, it is worthwhile taking some time to dispel the more common myths.
- Bats in Ireland are completely harmless to people.
- Bats in Ireland eat only insects.
- Bats in Ireland do not carry rabies (and, in fact, it has been 118 years since there was any case of rabies in Ireland).
Unless you are part insect and weigh the same as a moth, the chances are that bats have very little interest in you.
A small group of us assemble at the gates of St. Finian’s just as dusk begins to settle. We are met by a pair of bat scientists (or Chiropterologists, to use my best dinner-party voice) who prime us on what to expect. On this ramble, we will walk the site, both within it and around the external hedges, and will search for bats. They have with them a bat detector – an instrument that is able to translate the bat’s echo signal into something that a human ear can hear. They play samples for us, including examples of the most likely candidates for this site, the Common Pipistrelle and the Soprano Pipistrelle. I did not know what to expect from the sounds, but I did not expect this! Pulses of synth-like noises sound like the breakdown of an epic nightclub tune. It takes us all by surprise. When a sample of the Daubenton’s bat, which hunts on water surfaces in Ireland, is played, it is akin to the moment where the tune kicks back in and the club goes wild.
As the introductory talk continues, dusk firmly takes hold. The background noises subtly change as nocturnal birds take control of the soundscape. There are no clouds on this increasingly-chilly night and here, in this oasis of darkness, I can see the stars clearer than most other places in Lucan. Venus shines through like the last shining bulb on a Broadway sign.
And so we walk. We walk carefully in the long, dark grasses, one eye on the shadows cast by the undulating ground, the other on the sky horizon above the treeline as we watch for a flicker.
We do not find any bats initially, though the black cat that lives amongst the graveyard headstones draws our attention on more than one occasion. I see a flutter in the hedgerows that turns out to be a bird. As we make our way down to the adjacent green to look at the other side of the hedgerow, we are greeted with a confused and statue-still dog who, most likely doesn’t realise that we are performing a bat census. He does not move for the next fifteen minutes. Above him, I see the perfect outline of a Heron flying to the east, most likely returning back to its nest following an exhausting day of heroning. No bats though …
There are more than a few bats in St. Catherine’s Park and Griffeen Valley Park. There are bats in Vesey Park, something that I was only reminded of last week by a bat that flew over a wall as I walked past late at night, forcing it to alter its course upwards in the shape of my nearby head. But to locate the presence of a bat in St. Finian’s would be another reason to love this site.
St. Finian’s is more than a tranquil oasis ruin. The floor-tiles found here, I learn, are the same as those laid in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, meaning that this was a church of some status. There are elements of brickwork in the walls that would seem to date it to pre-Norman Ireland. St. Finian’s is, therefore, less a ruin and more a sanctuary where hidden elements of our local past have sought refuge and survived. To find out that it is also used by our local bat population as a sanctuary from encroaching modernity would make this place yet more special still.
However, as the tramble around the site draws to a close, we have detected a grand total of zero bats. The scientists tell us that this is one of the last weeks that it might be possible to see a bat before hibernation kicks in. It has been a good summer, meaning that they may be hibernating already. Additionally, it is the coldest night we have had for some time, and the bats may well have decided to stay at home, slippers on, with a cup of steaming-hot insect juice in their ‘World’s Best Mammal’ mugs. Hope begins to fade from the group.
Just then the bat detector springs to life and the nightclub erupts as we hear the musical pulses of the Common Pipistrelle and the sanctuary that is St. Finian’s becomes a little bit more special.