New Orleans History -- Lake Pontchartrain
Thursday, October 03, 2024
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3. Bats??? You mean like vampire bats?


On many nights a special visitor, or two, or three, or more might drop in.
'Fly in' would be a better description.

Because bats love to eat insects and insects (especially mosquitoes) love water, there were plenty of both at the camp. A bat would usually show up suddenly and unannounced.

People would be sitting around the camp talking or playing cards or whatever then someone would start to giggle in an eery, funny, but uncomfortable sort of way. That's when you knew a bat was flying around the camp. And then you'd look around and see it.

There was usually a pretty standard routine that followed:

1. Some people would hide under a table
2. Other people would run to the other another rooms and close the doors so the bat wouldn't get into the other parts of the camp.
3. Mothers with small children would take them into a room and close the door so that the children wouldn't be upset by all the confusion that would follow.
4. Big kids and some adults would grab brooms and start running around swatting at the bat. This was always comical and it took a whole lot of swats to finally hit the bat.
5. The stunned bat would then be swept outside onto the porch.
6. Everyone went back to what they were doing before the bat stopped by.

The process might be repeated several times per night.

Strange as it sounds it was really fun when this happened.

Everyone knew that bats are not the scary, gross creatures that the movies make them out to be. They don't hurt people, they don't attack people, they just fly around at night looking for supper. Sometimes they just happened to follow a mosquito or other insect into the camp.
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Click below to visit an awesome website about bats.
You can learn all about bats, play games, hear what they really sound like, and take a bat quiz to see just how much you really know about these fascinating creatures.