Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [2]
Some of the more conservation-minded workers like Jumbo did their best to calm a frightened public that was already bat phobic. Local superstition told of the existence of human-sized blood feeders called soucouyants. These were supposedly old crones that could shed their skin at night and assume the shape of a fiery ball. To protect oneself from attack, homeowners would sprinkle a bag of rice outside their door. For some reason, the soucouyant couldn’t enter until she had counted every rice grain.
Rabies control personnel like Jumbo’s supervisor, Farouk Muradali, ignored the myths (and I could never envision Jumbo wasting all that rice). Instead, they stressed that only two of the fifty-eight bat species on their island were vampires, and generally speaking, only one of those (the common vampire bat) was a significant rabies threat.
After chatting with the homeowners for about an hour and a half, we checked the mist nets. In one net we had captured a fruit bat (Carollia), and a tiny nectar feeder (Glossophaga). Moving to the second net my flashlight beam illuminated three dark figures. I could see that they were far more muscular than the bats we’d just released and they twisted in the nets, biting and screeching as we approached.
“Diaemus youngi,” I exclaimed, donning a pair of thick leather gloves.
“Dey look hungry,” Jumbo replied. “And speaking of food…”
The vampire bats were carefully extracted from the nets and placed into small cotton bags where they calmed down immediately. A week later they would be among eight specimens of Diaemus exported to New Mexico, where they quickly acclimated to the blood of American chickens. The bats’ arrival there would spark a minor media frenzy (“Rare Vampires Dodge Death in Desert Town,” “Vampire Bats Form Colony in New Mexico”) that would resurface several months later (“Birth of a Vampire!”) when one of the captives delivered a female pup. After a contest publicized by the Long Island paper Newsday, the baby vampire bat would be christened Amelia (after another famous female flier).
Jumbo and I stayed out for another hour that humid night in Trinidad, but when the full moon rose we knew there would be no more captures. Vampire bats are notoriously lunar phobic, as are many other bat species.
Two hours later we were eating chicken dinners at an all-night KFC knockoff in downtown Arima.
It seemed like the right thing to do.
As you might have guessed by now, this is a book about blood-feeding creatures and, by association, the substance that they feed upon.*2 Some of the creatures you’ll be reading about, like leeches, bed bugs, and white-winged vampire bats, are mere nuisances. Others—fleas, chiggers, and yes, even the common vampire bat—can be killers. They carry and transmit some of the world’s deadliest diseases, including bubonic plague, scrub typhus, and rabies. Still others spread debilitating diseases like Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. And even when they don’t transmit disease, fear of these creatures can lead to delusional parasitosis,