Reba Place Eco-Letter: Halloween is over, but I want you to be a bat.

rpcoffice
Nov 12, 2025
3 min read

Learning from our fuzzy, flying friends.

by: Jesse Miller, Nov 6

My four-year-old son drew this in the summer after seeing bats fly over our campsite in the evening.

Batman’s unaddressed childhood trauma left him in an endless quest for vengeance. Let’s not be like that. But, maybe there are some things we can learn from those mysterious flying mammals?

Be a little bit sneaky

We know bats are creatures of the night. That might make them a little creepy to some of us, but being nocturnal probably keeps bats safe from predators.¹ I’m usually all for transparency and openness, but sometimes it’s safer to be sneaky.

Practice mutual aid

Bats have complex social relationships. Most bats roost in colonies for warmth. They communicate with each other, groom each other, and occasionally help each other give birth. A mother will nurse its own pup, but will also nurse other baby bats looking for sustenance.² Vampire bats will regurgitate a meal to help other adult bats that were not able to feed for the night.³

Good Christian friends, are we not also called upon to regurgitate our food for the other?⁴

Plant seeds for the future

Climate change is causing stronger and more frequent tropical storms. Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerta Rico in 2017, became one of the deadliest and costliest storms to hit the region. Along with human death and property damage, the strong winds and floods devastated the rainforests.

Yet after the storm, bats in the genus Stenoderma played a major role in reviving the landscape. Stenoderma eat fruit and disperse the seeds in their poop. The gut of the bat actually helps prepare the seed and the rest of the poop acts as fertilizer. It turns out that Stenoderma can be “responsible for up to 95% of the regrowth of tropical forests after destructive events like hurricanes.”⁵ In the wake of destruction, bats work to plant seeds for a flourishing future.

A few more things:

Still a chance to return to 1.5C climate goal, researchers say. World leaders meet in Brazil for COP30. Every degree matters.
The Sun Also Rises. Ric Hudgens on Bill McKibben: “What makes McKibben’s argument so compelling—and so distinct from typical climate advocacy—is how he weaves together three threads that most people keep separate: the hard economics of energy, the politics of freedom and resistance to authoritarianism, and a deep Christian theology of creation care.”
Jane Goodall, In Memoriam. Listen to Krista Tippett’s interview with Goodall who “spent the last decades of her life on the road, often with the young, tending to human fear and misunderstanding.”
Cities Are For Songbirds: Conservation and Coexistence in Biophilic Cities. Join Natural Habitat Evanston for this Zoom talk. Or watch the previous talk on Crane Migrations.
Wetlands Help Remedy Agricultural Pollution. Some Illinois Farmers Are Installing New Ones. Wetlands filter runoff and provide essential habitat, yet the supreme court rolled back protections in 2023. Now it’s up to states, local communities, and farmers to protect them.
As Data Centers Proliferate Across Illinois, Communities Grapple with How to Supply the Necessary Water. Inside Climate News reports: “Much of the water used in data centers never gets back into the watershed, particularly if the data center uses a method called evaporative cooling. Even if that water does go back into the ecosystem, deep bedrock aquifers, like the Mahomet in central Illinois, can take centuries to recharge. In the Great Lakes, just 1 percent of the water is renewed each year from rain, runoff and groundwater.”
Life After Cars. A new book describes how cars ruin everything and how we can imagine new possibilities.
Strange New World. From Emergence Magazine: “Probing the flatness of his Midwestern landscape, Roy Scranton asks how we can challenge ourselves to peer beyond what simply meets the eye and come to know a place’s ecological, geological, and cosmological dimensions.”