Bat heaven is in turbine-free Mexico
Jim McPherson Milford Mar 07, 2013 | countylive.ca
In winter evenings I relax in my hammock under our seaside palapa to watch the sun set behind the jagged peaks that frame the bay in Melaque, Mexico. Here we are treated to a different skyscape every evening, and the lucky bats are treated to a turbine-free fly zone.
When I cast my eyes down from the sunset, I see a 12 inch circle of bat guano on the floor. When I look up to under the palapa’s peak, I see a small family of eight bats that have been hanging out all day, upside-down and motionless. Their eyes are wide open, awaiting the dusk.
About five minutes after the sun sinks behind the hills the bats begin to move, one by one. Ten minutes later they are all gone. When each bat is ready for the night, it crawls out between the dried palm fronds into the evening air and flits about, feasting on gourmet Mexican insects.
These Melaque bats are about the size of Ontario’s small Norway rat. They make a good contribution to insect control in the productive farmlands around Manzanillo, just as County bats harvest millions of flying insects from our farmlands at home.
But the bats in my Mexican palapa are much luckier than the bats in the County. Like the County, this part of Mexico has lots of agriculture and tourism, but unlike the County, and other parts of Mexico, this is Bat Heaven, because here there are no proposed infestations of Industrial Wind Turbines. (When a bat flies close to a wind turbine its lungs explode from the severe pressure differential.)
Why don’t the Ontario politicians from urban ridings seem to care that bats reduce the need for pesticides in Ontario’s agricultural countryside? Don’t they know that Industrial Wind Turbines explode bat lungs?
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2013/03/07/bat-heaven-is-in-turbine-free-mexico/