Sunday Rerun (7/26/2020) Counting On You

 I was just thinking the other day about December. Oh, how I love December, the month when it starts to get chilly and there are no mosquitoes and humidity and crazy birds howling outside at 0445 but there are all those "Year In Review" news specials on television every night.

And I thought, if they're going to do a "2020 In Review" wrapup special, they'd better start the night after Thanksgiving and make it a four-hour thing every night.

And even then, by the time they discuss the coronavirus and the unrest in the streets and the presidential campaign, there won't be much time to discuss sports.

And since it's starting to look like there won't be any baseball played this year, the only bats we'll talk about are the ones that New Hampshire will be counting.

That's right. It's not just humans who are having their census taken this year.
Fish and Game Department officials in the Granite State want to round up  volunteers to go around counting bats.

If you're into it, they will have you count the bats on your property and around your town. They want to get a head count on bats.

Hint: good places to look include barns and church steeples.

There is a disease - biologists call it "white-nose syndrome" -  that is dropping the bat population faster than the popularity of Mike Myers.  As a result, the bat census in the Northeast US is expected to be way down, and science wants to keep an eye on their maternity colonies.

I see you right now, reading this and saying you don't care about bats. When pressed, most people give "they're ooogy" as the reason behind their disdain.  And even though bats are important to the world's biosystems because they help pollinate plants, and swallow insects that won't ever get the chance to bite me, we still don't like them.

So please, if you have spare time this summer because that trip abroad just ain't happening, think about going to bat for the two bat species in New Hampshire: the little brown bat and the big brown bat.

A Big Brown Bat

A Little Brown Bat

Show of hands: who else is surprised to see how big their teeth are?