Furry night flyers soaring high above Broadway

‘Hon, I think those are bats. Could there be bats in the Bronx?’ David Moreno, 29 asked his girlfriend on a warm evening near Broadway. The answer, city wildlife experts say, is yes.

By Kevin Deutsch

They began emerging from the darkest corners of Van Cortlandt Park a few weeks ago: dark, V-shaped, furry blurs, barely visible against the night sky. With a few effortless flaps of their wings, the creatures buzzed over Broadway at speeds faster than any local bird.

“What the heck was that?” David Moreno, 29, asked his girlfriend when he first saw the animals gliding high above the Parade Ground. Tracking their movements, he eventually realized what he was seeing. “Hon, I think those are bats. Could there be bats in the Bronx?”

The answer, city wildlife experts say, is yes. And now is the perfect time to glimpse the rarely seen, muchmythologized creatures. Little brown bats — the most common type in the city — have been making daily flights above Broadway and the Van Cortlandt Mansion throughout July, freshly rested after a season of hibernation.

The park is an ideal spot for the nocturnal mammals to sleep, with its countless dark nooks and abundance of trees, according to the city’s Urban Park Rangers. The animals venture out into the fading light around sundown each evening, using echolocation — a kind of radar — to find and prey on mosquitoes and other insects that swarm the Parade Ground.

Thousands of bats reside in all five boroughs of the city. Longtime New Yorkers may have even found one roosting in their home at one time or another. And while decades of vampire myths have given bats a bad reputation, they are mostly harmless.

“I think a lot of people have this natural instinct to be terrified of bats because of urban myths about how they’ll fly into your hair, or because they’ve heard too many vampire stories,” said Richard Simon, citywide captain of the Urban Park Rangers. “But bats can be beneficial, especially in a place like the Bronx where you may have a problem with mosquitoes.”

Little brown bats aren’t light eaters, either, polishing off half of their body weight in insects each evening, experts say.

“They’re doing a huge service to people,” Mr. Simon said.

Some other little brown bat facts: the glossy skinned creatures can live 20 to 30 years, and are found in most states other than Florida, Texas and southern California. They hear high frequency sounds emitted by their prey and feed primarily over still water, where insects are plentiful. The world’s only true flying mammal, bats will occasionally swoop down close to people to catch the insects that swarm around them.

New York’s bats are best appreciated from a distance, as they can carry rabies. They’re not likely to pass it on to people, though, as no human cases of rabies have been found in the city in more than 50 years, according to the city’s health department.

The best time to spot the furry flyers in Van Cortlandt Park is around sundown at the Parade Ground, or near the park’s cozy bat resting places known as “bat boxes,” one of which is in the backyard of the Van Cortlandt Mansion.

Local bats, though, could be seen less and less due to a mysterious ailment called White Nose Syndrome, characterized by a white fungus that grows on the nose, wings and tails of affected bats.

In recent years, the syndrome has decimated bat populations in the Northeast. Affected bats become emaciated, end their hibernation period prematurely, and die between 80 and 100 percent of the time.

First identified among hibernating bats outside Albany in 2007, the ailment has killed tens of thousands of bats, with little brown bats dying off at a faster rate than others.

Experts worry the region’s entire bat population could perish if the ailment isn’t curbed.

It’s not known whether the bats in Van Cortlandt Park have been affected. But local bat gazers hope the animals are here to stay.

“They make you feel like you’re someplace else completely,” Mr. Moreno said. “Definitely not the city.”

This is part of the July 30, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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