Most nights in the spring and summer, as the sun begins to fold itself down in the western sky and the daylight slips off like a cocktail dress, bats emerge from some mysterious place in our front yard, and jerk back and forth in the air above our heads, like calligraphy with wings.
It is beautiful.
You would hope something so beautiful would last and last. But there is a terrible-awful happening to our natural world these days, and bats are dying in record numbers.
Geomyces destructans.
It is the scientific name for the fungus that is sweeping like a genocide through bat colonies in the U.S. The street term is white nose syndrome: a fungus that infects and invades hibernating bats, whose muzzles appear fungi-dusted with white powdered sugar, making them look kind of like Al Pacino in “Scarface.”