Before I came here someone on a message board had posted that there were not many mosquitoes at Chautauqua because there were quite a few bats around. Yeah, right. I dismissed that thought quickly & packed 2 bottles of bug repellent; how could a few bats possibly matter? And it does turn out that he was wrong. There are not "quite a few" bats around. There are hundreds of them, thousands of them. There are flocks of them. I was looking for a better word, but anything like 'hordes' or 'legions' has a vampirish feel to it, which is the opposite of what I want. These are silent, swoopy, tiny creatures that fill the dusk air with flitting shapes and puncuate a glance out the window or a walk along the lake with little commas of second looks to try to follow their flight paths.
Chautauqua as a whole, in fact, is batty for bats. At the book shop there is an entire section (up front) devoted to bat books for all ages. There are t-shirts, tote bags, magnets, book marks, and several stuffed animals.
And I can't say I blame them. Coming from a Wisconsin summer where stepping outside for longer than 10 seconds is an open invitation to every mosquito in the neighborhood, the relief of being able to sit in a garden for 3 hours painting (sans bug spray), as I did the other day, and not have one single mosquito so much as fly by, is hardly short of miraculous.
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