Maybe you’ve noticed that a lot of libraries let you check out more than books or even music or movies. In some communities you can check out sewing machines, musical instruments, and even cooking spices. Writer Tamar Charney recently brought home a batscanner from the Ann Arbor District Library.
I’d never heard of a batscanner. I stumbled onto it in the library’s list of tools. It just sounded like something from Batman. Well, I mean it is, but the library doesn’t check out that kind of batscanner. Whatever.
A batscanner still sounded nerdy enough to be cool. And Steve Amick had written a review in the catalog. He’s an Ann Arbor based novelist. He wrote that “you can dance to it.” Now I was really intrigued. So I put a hold on one. A few days later I had a little device about the size of my iPhone.
I waited for sunset and headed outside to see what it does.
After a bit, I started to hear the bats.
So did the batscanner — but not the way I did. It's basically a bat detector. Bats use echolocation to navigate in the dark. The scanner listens for these sounds. Sounds we humans mostly can’t hear. It transposes those sounds into something we can hear. That way you can know if there are bats around.
It’s a helpful tool for people who study bats and those of us who are bat curious. It provides a way to listen to voices we don’t usually hear — the voice of a being that’s often feared and misunderstood.
I’ve long known there are bats hunting bugs above my house in the summer. I’ve watched them dart about. But bat voices aren’t ones I can hear in the summer night chorus even though they are part of the performance. Thanks to the bat scanner, I got to hear that the night chorus has a Detroit techno bat-beat.
And yeah, you can sort of dance to it!
