Bat Soup

But it's diluted with sky, not water, the aerial plankton on which they sup. Our solitary pipistrelle flickers over her chosen suburban quarter, echo-locating, to siphon it up. It nourishes birds as well as bats - high-flyers that feed on the wing, swifts, house-martins - this floating gruel of hymenoptera, midges and gnats, thunderbugs, beetles, aphids, flies, moths, mosquitoes, and flying dots almost too small to be worth naming. Some of it swirls at a lower level - a broth of midges over a pool at dusk or a simultaneous hatch of mayflies boiling up from Lough Neagh: swallow-fodder, and also a splotch to plaster on any passing windscreen, though even at speed there's never so much as of yore; bad news for the food-chain, but somehow ‘où sont les neiges d'antan' sounds too noble a note of dole for a sullying mash of blood and chitin. (And we can't hear what the bats are screaming.)