In this the first programme in the new autumn season, the Hedgehog and the Fox go in search of bats, in the company of Tessa Laird. Tessa, who teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, began painting these creatures as a student, after encountering the bats of Australia, which has a much richer variety of them than her native New Zealand.
Other bat-related projects followed, the latest of them a book entitled Bat in the Animal series published by Reaktion. As with all the volumes in the series, the reader learns not only about the natural history of the animals, but also humans’ relationship with them across a wide variety of historical and cultural contexts.
In China the bat’s name is a homophone for ‘luck’ so it’s often depicted as a symbol for good fortune. But bats, it’s fair to say, have had a pretty bad press throughout much of human history, associated as they are with night, stealth, unpredictability, madness, disease and, of course, vampirism.
As you’ll hear, that situation may now be changing, as images of cuddly baby bats proliferate on social media, but for some endangered species of bat this is too little, too late.
(For more on bat conservation, see Bat Conservation International.)