Going Batty

One thing that suburban Israel has in abundance that I have rarely seen in suburban Canada (which does not include the Okanagan and Annapolis valleys, or the Niagara Peninsula) is fruit trees – oranges, apples, grapefruits, bananas, figs, dates, olives, pomegranates and more.

Now who doesn’t like fruit trees? They smell nice, the blossoms are beautiful and you can pick the fruit and eat it on the spot. My husband has a theory that if you are going to be a starving person, Israel is the best place to do it. Not that that is anything to aspire to!

Well, that is all nice and dandy, but the most important thing I have learned about fruit trees is that they are the home base for fruit bats.Many, many fruit bats.

We have fruit bats swooping overhead on our street every night during fruit season – which is a pretty long season in Israel. And they really do swoop and twirl because they are bats and as the saying goes, they are blind.

Walking down our street any given night I risk dodging fruit bats flying helter skelter barely over my five-foot-three-inch head. I really feel bad for all the tall people on our street. The truth is that the bats probably don’t swoop as low as I think they do, but when it comes to bats, anything less than 25 feet of personal air space is just too little for me.

The first time I noticed them, we were new in Israel and I thought they were birds out for the winged equivalent of a night time stroll. It’s amazing what you can convince yourself of if you try. The moment of truth came when I noticed one of these night birds hanging upside down from the fig tree across the street from my house. All of a sudden reality hit me in the face – they’re bats!

Desperate times called for desperate measures so I calmed myself by reminding said self that it could be worse -- they could be mice (or rats) and they could be at ground level.

But I can honestly say that on more than one occasion, I have been held hostage by those crazed bats. One night, after returning home from the grocery store, I sat in my car for twenty bloody minutes waiting for a break in the overhead action – or morning light – which ever came first. Finally, as my meat and ice cream were defrosting in the trunk, I knew I had to take a chance.

I maneuvered the car as close as I could to my house, reached over three rows of seats and grabbed all the temperature-sensitive groceries. The rest, I figured, could wait until morning. With a firm hand on those cheap plastic grocery store bags, I bolted out the side door of my van, slammed it shut and never looked back.

True, it was a small and temporary victory. But in the meantime the advantage was mine.

Me: 1, Bats: 0