Bat Wars

Bats. Funnily enough they were not creatures I had ever given much thought to as a city dweller. But they’ve been a feature of my life ever since I moved to the country twenty years ago.

We have had our adventures, the bats and I, as they sometimes found their way inadvertently into my house. Hanging on the bathroom curtains, lurking under my bed or flitting silently around the sitting room. Every visit has caused mild panic in me. I do realise they are harmless creatures and I have always done my best to evict or remove them without injury to either them or myself.

But now my two lunatic young cats have added a new dimension of bat warfare to life.

For the last while I’ve noticed that the cats have taken to thundering around the roof of my house at dusk. It’s a single storey cottage type and they leap up on to the oil boiler which is adjacent to the lowest point of the roof. It is only a couple of feet – nothing to these agile young cats – from there up to the roof.

The first thing that alerts us – myself and my wee doggie Pippin – is the thud of them lepping onto the boiler.  Pippin makes a rush for the sofa next to the window giving of her best imitation of a Doberman or German Shepherd right beside my ear. Of course by that stage the intrepid pair – Seamus and Dusty – are nowhere in sight, so after some more warning barks, Pippin resumes her dozing on the sofa beside the fire.

Shortly after they find their way onto the roof there are intermitted bouts of what sounds like a herd of elephants running across the roof of the kitchen. Needless to say Pippin is yet again quite perturbed by this unexplained and unseen sound of galloping intruders. Her ears perk up, she rises from her prone position and glares at me as if to enquire what am I going to do to sort things out.

At first I thought they were just larking about, exploring new territory, indulging their curiosity as cats are wont to do. I did think however that it seemed a strange place to be running around at night when there were acres of fields and hedgerows to explore.

But the other evening I found out what they were at. Chasing, and I am sorry to say, catching bats. How they do it I do not know. There is a pitched roof on the house, so no flat surface from which to pounce and surely the bats have enough sense not to be sitting around on top of the roof. But catch them they do.

I saw it with my own eyes in the deep dusk the other evening. I thought it was a mouse that Dusty was ‘playing’ with in that awful way that cats do. As I watched mesmerised out the window however I realised that, since mice do not fly, it must be a bat. Uuurgh!

I banged on the window to distract the cat and indeed she did look my way and the bat took its chance and flitted off into the hedge. But alas next morning on the door mat was a dead bat – either that one did not effect a successful escape, or another one took its place. Either way, the bat population around here was reduced by at least one.

What to do about it I’m not quite sure. I cannot move the boiler. I can’t visualise what kind of barrier would prevent the cats accessing the roof. I suppose all that I can hope for is that the bats learn by experience to avoid swooping low enough at that point to evade capture.

In the meantime I’ll just turn up the TV and myself and Pippin will try to ignore the mayhem all around us!

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Abe Lincoln & Me

I have just discovered a link between Abraham Lincoln and myself. It’s tenuous, I’ll give you that, but a link it is, sent to me in black and white, nonetheless.

For the last several years I have been determined to ferret out what family history I can. It started after the death of my mother, reading through old letters and postcards trying to piece together from fragments of correspondence a whole missing line of my family.

Perhaps it’s an age thing. The older you get the more important the past seems to become. I have become intrigued to see patterns emerging – patterns in occupations, health conditions, looks and personal characteristics.

For instances – and stop me if I’m boring you – but I discovered that my great grandfather was a policeman and served in the RIC. On the other side of the world and almost a hundred years later, I found a second cousin of whom I had no previous knowledge who had just retired from Los Angeles police department.

Coincidence, probably. But surely if doctors, lawyers and politicians can run in families – why not policemen?

But I digress. Back to Abraham Lincoln and me. As I said I have been researching my mother’s side of my family, since naturally, it was mostly to that side that the correspondence referred. My mother’s father had married a Catholic woman, to the seeming horror of his two Presbyterian brothers. While one of them eventually was reconciled, the elder brother broke all ties and I never even knew he existed before I found the store of letters.

Genealogy is a huge area of interest for people all over the world. There are people poring over documents, scanning micro-fiches in dusty rooms, searching on-line, off-line and between the lines trying to connect with people living and dead.

And while there is nothing like turning the pages of an ancient ledger of birth records – there is also a lot to be said for the internet and the wondrous speed and accessibility it affords to the part-time researcher like myself. 

It was a combination of searching the 1901 and 1911 Census of Ireland along with placing messages on genealogical sites that have lead Abraham and me to the same page. And it’s not that I have presidential ambitions and hopefully it’s not that I’m in line for assassination.

But it turns out that a very distant relation was a famous detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. According to my source he was also an undercover agent in discovering the so-called Baltimore Plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

My son-in-law has already pointed out to me this evening the tangled nature of this link. This guy was my gran-uncle’s wife’s mother’s brother. Yes I can see that it’s a bit of a mouthful and hard to get your head around if you say it out loud. But written out like that … well, I can almost see me and Abe putting the finishing touches to his Gettysburg speech, or pondering the station of the nation over a couple of iced teas on his front porch!

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