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“With all respect to the beaver and the maple leaf, if it were up to me, little brown bats would be Canada’s emblem,” Neil writes. But his beloved bats are disappearing. In his luminous and devastating feature, he traces the plight of white-nose syndrome — a European fungal disease that emerged in New York state in 2006, most likely carried by a tourist, and has spread across North America. There is no known cure, and no way to stop the spread of the disease, which reached Alberta in 2022. Millions of bats have died so far.
There are many pragmatic reasons to worry about the disappearance of bats, which fill critical ecological roles, particularly when it comes to managing mosquito populations. But Neil resists the impulse to appeal to human self-interest in making a case for bats. “I worry this is a narrow way of thinking, a shallow way of interacting with the world,” he writes. “I did not learn to love bats because they ate some bugs that would otherwise bite me. I learned to love them because of their acrobatics, their mastery of the night, the shock and delight of their appearance, sudden and silent in the air.”
It’s that reverence that brought Neil back to the badlands last summer, where he’d hoped to find survivors.
Like all the best writing about the natural world, Neil’s story will transform how you understand the species who share our planet, to reconsider what you might have overlooked. It’s impossible to read it and not be captivated by the little brown bat, just in time for its disappearance to break your heart.
Take care and watch the night skies,
Michelle Cyca
Editor, Indigenous-led conservation
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