[HN Gopher] Hundreds of Houston bats were saved after a cold snap
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Hundreds of Houston bats were saved after a cold snap
Author : rntn
Score : 30 points
Date : 2022-12-29 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| cwdegidio wrote:
| I live about a block from Waugh Bridge (mentioned in the
| article). It is not unusual to have 10 or 15 neighborhood locals
| stationed at the bridge at dusk to see the bats as they leave for
| the evening. During the warmer months, when bayou insects are
| thriving, it's not unusual for me to see them flying around when
| taking the dogs for their evening walk. From what I understand,
| during our last freeze (the infamous freeze that knocked out the
| power grid here in Texas), there was almost a full colony
| collapse. Glad to hear that this time someone was thinking about
| them.
| Ocerge wrote:
| I used to run around Buffalo Bayou when I lived in Montrose. I
| love that area of Houston, it has some of the best food in the
| world within a 5-minute drive from there. The bats were super
| cool too, glad to see they survived the freeze (even if a ton
| of vegetation definitely didn't).
| tiahura wrote:
| Lived around Buffalo Bayou off Washington between Shepherd
| and Waugh just as gentrification was getting started (04).
| After seeing the bat sign on the bridge, I always kept my
| distance.
| voisin wrote:
| [flagged]
| misnome wrote:
| Not many people can personally care for 1600 homeless people in
| their attic.
| voisin wrote:
| Touche
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The situation here is also far more akin to what "homeless"
| meant pre-1980, or largely pre-1970.
|
| Up through the 1960s, _homelessness_ was almost wholly a
| _temporary_ condition, and _the immediate result_ of some
| calamity: fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, or other acute
| disaster. Homelessness was _not_ used to describe the
| condition of being _chronically_ unsheltered for the most
| part. Terms such as "transient", "unattached", "itinerant",
| "vagrant", and the like were more common. The condition was
| far more associated with working age _men_ rather than
| _families_.
|
| This can be confirmed through Google's Ngram Viewer using a
| wildcard search such as "* homeless" (where "made homeless"
| and "rendered homeless" are among the top results in the
| period 1800--1970:
|
| <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*+homeless&yea
| ...>
|
| Contrast 1971--2000 where these fall down ("made ...") or off
| ("rendered ...") the list entirely.
|
| You can also search the term in archives such as the _New
| York Times_ where it is clear that through the early 1970s
| the term almost wholly applied to disasters.
|
| (I've noted this before on HN, see:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499697>.)
|
| The bats in this story effectively suffered a _single_ and
| _acute_ shock. They were sheltered in an attic, and released
| back to the wild.
|
| Our experience with homelessness has shown that short-term
| shelters are not in fact viable interventions _to solving the
| underlying causes_. That 's not to say that short-term
| interventions are never appropriate: when someone's drowning,
| throw them a line, get them out of the water, move them to
| safety, get them warm, etc. But if you find that a certain
| location, or population, seems to be continuously drowning,
| you might care to move upstream to find what's generating
| that condition.
|
| (The flagged parent comment is in some ways a shallow
| dismissal, but also a teachable moment.)
| 0ct4via wrote:
| Full article (including images):
| https://www.npr.org/2022/12/28/1145923340/1-600-bats-fell-to...
| dang wrote:
| Changed to that from https://text.npr.org/1145923340. Thanks!
| daveslash wrote:
| Oh, thank you for linking to a text.npr.org page. For those who
| don't know, https://text.npr.org is a text-only version of the
| site. Very lite.
|
| In regards to the article - this is good news to hear. But I
| wonder, as weather events get more frequent and more extreme, how
| much can we keep this up? And as good as this news is, this makes
| it seems like we got lucky because someone just happened to think
| to themselves: _" Mary Warwick, the wildlife director at the
| Houston Humane Society, said she was out doing holiday shopping
| when the freezing winds reminded her that she hadn't heard how
| the bats were doing in the unusually cold temperatures for the
| region."_ - Can we hope to be so lucky next time? Seems like a
| game of whack-a-mole, where there moles are just getting faster
| and faster...
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| The text version is strictly inferior here because it doesn't
| include the images.
| Xylakant wrote:
| It's also strictly superior, because it doesn't contain
| cookies or JavaScript and loads quickly even on slower
| connections.
| adolph wrote:
| > how much can we keep this up?
|
| Large colonies under relatively exposed bridges are not likely
| an evolutionarily winning behavior in the long term even
| without an increase in extreme weather frequency.
|
| Since there is a healthy bat population that otherwise survives
| well throughout Houston in trees, eaves and elsewhere, the loss
| of less robustly situated bats isn't going to make a large
| difference, in my layperson's point of view. There isn't a need
| to keep anything up because the bats do just fine without human
| interference.
| mncharity wrote:
| Engineering bat boxes for nice thermal properties is apparently a
| research topic, eg[1]. Given the context of "freezing ... but its
| still Houston", I was intrigued by the concepts[2] of having
| adjacent boxes with diverse thermals, and of single boxes
| containing diverse microclimates.
|
| [1]
| https://academic.oup.com/conphys/article/10/1/coac027/657406...
| [2] https://www.batcon.org/article/designing-better-bat-houses/
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