Whales get lots of attention. Big, splashy, charismatic creatures, their clicks and songs carry for miles and are available to anyone with an inexpensive hydrophone, a spa membership, or a Spotify account. They appeal to us on an emotional level. 

Consider, instead, bats, as we tend to do this time of year. Putting aside their curse of bad publicity, bats pollinate tropical orchards and agave fields (yes, Tequila) and consume numberless flying afflictions each warm season, and those are just the nice things they do for us. (One could even argue they’re cute when viewed from certain angles and distances, but that’s clearly subjective.) 

The fact is that they are incredible little guys. Their way of perceiving and navigating their world, their Umwelt, is so vastly different from ours. Imagine hearing a cricket’s footsteps or the ripples caused by a minnow’s tail, while flying. Or finding your dinner by reflecting your voice off a single grain of rice. 

They communicate constantly, all around us, and they are LOUD: 140dB-at-4-inches loud. Yet we hear none of it. Their social conversation and sounds of the hunt can be as much as five octaves off the high end of the piano’s keyboard – way beyond our own range of hearing. Meanwhile, they hear nothing of our world – our conversations, our arguments and rendezvous, are inaccessible to their own finely tuned ears. We operate too low on the metaphorical piano for them to access.

Our aural worlds are completely inaccessible to one another while we live alongside each other. 

So the next time you see a fluttering figure overhead at dusk, or a plastic one hung on a parkway tree Thursday night, consider this wonderful parallel existence and marvel that two creatures can see and hear the world so differently.

National Park Service Explains and Exhibits Echolocation

Merlin Tuttle Bat Conservancy Official Site