Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part 1 No Country for Old Chickens
1. Wallerfield
2. Children of the Night
3. Snapple, Anyone?
Part 2 Let It Bleed
4. Eighty Ounces
5. The Red Stuff
6. A Beautiful Friendship
Part 3 Bed Bug & Beyond
7. Sleeping with the Enemy
8. Of Mites and Men
9. Candiru: with a Capital C and That Rhymes with P
10. A Tough Way to Make a Living
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Copyright
For Marie Grace Schutt and William A. Schutt Sr.
…and all my Aunt Roses
I know that our late King, though not apt to believe more than his neighbours, had no doubt of the existence of vampires and their banquets on the dead.
—Horace Walpole, commenting in a letter on the beliefs of King George II
The blood is the life.
—Deuteronomy 12:23
PROLOGUE
( 2002 )
A pair of chickens scratched nervously at the dusty ground beneath the grapefruit tree, careful to avoid the small puddles of coagulated blood.
“This happened last night.” The voice from behind me belonged to Amos “Jumbo” Johnson, my guide and field assistant. Jumbo worked for Trinidad’s Ministry of Agriculture in the Anti-Rabies Unit. I’d figured out several years earlier that Jumbo had gotten his nickname from the fact that the only thing he liked more than eating food was talking about it. But now he had gotten sidetracked—sort of.
“Tonight when the blood is fresh, it will glisten.”
I nodded, trying to determine if either of these sad-looking birds had been bled the night before. Was that a dark stain along one of their legs?
It was my third trip to Trinidad and I’d come for the same reason each time: to study vampire bats, arguably the most highly specialized of all living mammals. Feeding solely on blood, vampires make up a tiny fraction of the order Chiroptera (only three out of the eleven hundred bat species). But even among this exclusive group, Diaemus youngi, the white-winged vampire bat is special. Far more rare than Desmodus rotundus, the aptly named common vampire bat, Diaemus is an arboreal hunter—feeding primarily on birds and currently subsisting almost exclusively on the blood of domestic poultry. This in itself wasn’t all that strange. It was, after all, the arrival of man and his cattle that had exploded the common vampire bat populations. But it was how the white-winged vampires hunted that fascinated me.
While observing my captive colony at Cornell University, I’d seen something remarkable. Crawling across the floor of their feeding enclosure like a pair of spiders, the vampires made what I thought was a bold approach to a rather large hen. The bird cocked her head to one side, eyeing the bats. Her beak could have severely injured or even killed them—and I got ready to intervene. One of the vampires stopped a couple of inches beyond pecking distance but the other crept even closer. Then, amazingly, the bat nuzzled against the hen’s feathery breast. Instead of becoming alarmed, the bird seemed to relax a bit. The vampire responded by pushing itself deeper into what I would later learn was a sensitive section of feather-free skin called the brood patch. This was a region densely packed with surface blood vessels, where body heat could be efficiently transferred from the hen to her eggs. Later, the brood patch was where chicks snuggled up to warm themselves. As I watched, the hen reacted to the bat by fluffing her feathers, hunkering down, and finally—closing her eyes.
My God, I thought, these bats have learned to mimic chicks!
What was most remarkable to me was that in all likelihood chick mimicry wasn’t innate behavior written into the vampire’s DNA over millions of years. It must have been learned since the arrival of the Europeans and their domesticated fowl. Were vampire bat mothers teaching this behavior to their young?
So enthralled was I at this wonderfully diabolical maneuver (and its implications) that I never noticed that the second vampire had disappeared under the hoodwinked hen’s tail