What In The-

Big Brown bats, via

pet da owl

one of the best academic paper titles

Short little video of an eastern red bat!! : ) So fluffy and cute!!

Here is my small piece of advice/plea for for the future for y'all for today, and I may be lightly skirting an NDA to say it, so please listen:

If you can, buy physical books.

I work in publishing and I'm scared about what the election results are going to mean for the future of books by and about marginalized people, especially books for children. There are a lot of things you can do by trying to get involved locally, especially to mobilize against book bans and laws targeting libraries and schools. Voting with your wallet is still an extremely important tactic, because we're going to be hit with economic issues re: diverse books before we get hit with legal ones. But my immediate concern is what might happen with e-books.

It's already a known problem that if you "buy" a book on Kindle or another e-reader, that you're essentially renting it from that retailer, and if that retailer decides to remove that book, they can wipe it from your device. We also know that servers can be shut down. Content policies can change. It could get very difficult to find a copy of the files to pirate, much less to purchase.

But you can't delete a physical book from the world.

Physical books are about to become very important repositories. Collect them, if you can. Go to library sales. Go to thrift stores. Go to your local bookstore -- and bonus point here: independent bookstores are and will be great hubs for organizing in the coming days. Hell, I'd even encourage you to go through Amazon to send a message that these books are still financially viable. Lord knows the latter doesn't want to advertise them to you.

I know (I know) that physical books are expensive and getting more so. I know space is at a premium in a world where we're being pushed to live in smaller and smaller apartments with more and more roommates. But if there's a book that was important to you, and if it's a book you think a bigot wouldn't want to exist in the world, I urge you to get your hands on a physical copy of that book. If nothing else, to preserve it for the next generation.

ALL of us can be librarians. ALL of us can be archivists. ALL of us can work together to preserve marginalized voices, and to ensure that they are heard.

I love you. Keep fighting. We're in this together.

“ we always travel by hand ”

Got any adorable photos of Lasionycteris noctivagans? P.S.: a related question; are LANO capable of taking off from the ground, or are they a 'must drop to fly' bat species?

image description: a black bat with white-tipped fur being held with wings outstretched by a researcher wearing blue latex gloves. image source: Larisa Bishop-Boros, via wikipedia

Silver-haired Bat (Lasionycteris noctivagans) Technically all bats can take off from the ground, however, most species can not do it very well*, and the silver-haired bat is no exception to that.

*There's only a couple species that are known to be good at taking off from the ground: the common vampire bat, the pallid bat, and the New Zealand short-tailed bats.

Ty Beanie Babies: Batty the Bat (1995)

Just a lil' guy