‘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.”