Fahmeed Sheehan

Professor Alexandratos

MHC 200

The Grand Fiasco

The plan was, I would go to Fresh Kills at 10 PM, stay there till 1 AM, and bumble around like idiots in the dark, looking for bats. Every now and then we would find some, and someone in our party would yell in excitement or fear, or some combination of the two. Perhaps some of us would fall over in the dark and get gravely injured. Maybe I would proceed to relieve myself with all the expediency of an Amazon Prime delivery truck when a bat landed on me. None of this happened. None at all. Except us bumbling around like idiots in the dark.

We arrived at the Park on time. There were about 20 of us, including our biologists(?). When we drove to our designated location, we witnessed a massive net across the road in front of us. It was barely visible in the dark, even when we flashed our headlamps toward it. Our guide explained to us that the nets were designed with the intent of catching bats, which would then be studied. They spanned across the entire road, and rose to about 20 feet off the ground. Every 5 feet along the height of the net, there were pouches – bats would hit the net, then fall into the pouches, unable to escape. It made sense to do it at night, since that was when bats flew around to hunt.

So the plan was, a few bats would be captured, and we would get to see them, and proceed to add them to the database. But we caught not a single bat. For the three hours we spent there (from 9 PM to 12 AM), not a single bat decided to take a casual nightly flight along our stretch of road. All we managed to catch were a few stray leaves. The most impressive thing we managed to witness while we walked along our road were a couple of spiders weaving their webs. And these were very impressive webs: when we checked up on them in an hour, the web had approximately tripled in size. But the spider webs were as unsuccessful as our nets. Not a single one had caught insects.

Our night was a fiasco at best. Every now and then, we would hear our sensor beep in reaction to ultrasound frequencies emitted by bats. We saw precisely two bats flying above us, and heard around fifteen on the device. They were making fun of us. As if they’d figured out our plot and were deliberately flying near us. “We’re here; we just won’t let you catch us.”

As such, my BioBlitz experience was hugely uninspired and disappointing. Our guide mentioned that they’d been trying to catch some bats for days with no success. She mentioned that they’d had a much better “harvest” last year, with about a hundred different bat species documented at the Park. The lack of data, of course, is telling in itself; perhaps bat population at Fresh Kills are declining. But I’m still convinced that the bats were playing a calculated, cruel game with us. They’ve figured us out.