Country diary: even reduced to bare bones the bat's magic remains

‘A little body, wings folded and face scrunched’: the tiny corpse of a mouse-eared bat. Photograph: Amy-Jane Beer

I found it at the top of the field in July, after the barley harvest. A little body, wings folded and face scrunched. It was snagged on a scaffold of stubble like a miniature sky burial, overlooking a vista it must have known well until the previous night, when, somehow, all its knowing became nothing. Reflexively, I picked it up. In my hand, with its sky-tickling energy surrendered to gravity and its ultrasound din silenced, its dead weight might not have been there at all.

We were leaving on holiday next morning and in the frenzy of packing I almost forgot it. I should have taken measurements and got past a generic identification Myotis (mouse-eared bats). Instead, I hurriedly sealed the little corpse in a margarine tub with a perforated lid, along with a splash of water to prevent mummification, and left it on a shady sill in the garden.

The bat’s skull, balanced on the writer’s finger. Photograph: Amy-Jane Beer

By October, I had bat soup – myotistrone.

I added more water and skimmed off the fine fur and shed cases of fly pupae that floated free. What was left seemed so insubstantial that for a moment I wondered if some maggots devour tiny bones. But after further rinsing and gentle teasing with a cocktail stick, the broth cleared, and with a tiny paintbrush and tweezers I began to salvage a skeleton: the skull and mandibles fully intact, dozens of vertebrae, a clutter of ribs, pelvic bones, an annoyingly solitary shoulder blade, the long bones of the arms. The phalanges – the umbrella-spoke finger bones of the hand-wing – were whisker-fine, but strong. Myotis bats can live 30 years, so this bony airframe is built to last.

Last week, I took some bones to my son’s school. His class of six- and seven-year-olds passed around the skulls of a fox and a roe deer, while the bat lay on a sheet of black paper, waiting until last. One at a time, the children came to look through a hand lens at the tiny skull, the minuscule teeth, the tail bones smaller than a mark they could make with a pencil. And in their minds, I believe something flickered, and tickled the sky.

The bat’s tiny bones spread out for inspection. Photograph: Amy-Jane Beer

• All British bats are European protected species, and possession of remains, including bones, requires a licence from Natural England.
  

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