Bats - human to bat disease spreading

[Dave2002]

Perhaps the route for bats to transfer diseases, such as Covid-19, to humans is not a one way street - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/o...ovid-bats.html

This article about bats is very interesting.

[jayne lee wilson]

Wonderful animals. I've lived with them here for some decades, the Pipistrelles, of which there must be two or three pairs, currently in their relatively brief hibernation, up high in the old eaves of a generous roofspace. I love to watch them in Spring, hawking for insects at dusk with their uncannily acrobatic, echo-located flight.
I think I hear them scrabbling a little when, like midwinter hedgehogs, they wake up prematurely in very mild weather. But old houses have many bumps in the night, usually of animal origin, mostly from mice or pigeons.

On one remarkable day, I found one Common Bat lying flat in the kitchen yard, like an old dry leaf, in the early afternoon, in bright July sunshine. I took it up to the top floor intending to keep it in a covered box and hang it on a damp towel at dusk, out in the garden. But it was too lively! It wasn't going to stay in the alien human confinement of a box.
I then had the remarkable privilege of watching it flying slowly around the room, circumnavigating me, crash-landing on the scuffed old chairs.

I collected it up.... it snarled at me silently and nibbled my thumb, drawing a little blood. I never felt so honoured. So I hung it on the towel over an open window, and it soon took off around the corner of the roof, returning to the eaves it should never have left.

I never found out how it came to be marooned in the yard. I was rather sorry when the wound healed, leaving no scar.

[Serial_Apologist]

I've often wondered if the inventor of the umbrella was influenced by bat wing design.