Friday, July 18, 2008

The Dark Knight


The Bright Day is tomorrow. Going to a family BBQ, then dropping the kids off at their grandparents (wife's side). Then ... BATMAN!



It turns out bats like renewable energy. Like, they live in the shadows of hydrodams. I'm not a Joker.


Saw an ad for Consumers Energy the other day. It had a bat on it. How timely.


It turns out that 20,000 bats love the spillway at Tippy Hydro on the Manistee River. According to the ad:

"Temperatures a few degrees above freezing and moist walls with small pools of water at the bottom of the spillway chamber make it an ideal location for bats to hibernate. Brown bats, northern bats, a few Eastern pipistrelle bats and Indiana bats, a species listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act, spend their winters in the spillway."


It makes me wonder. The dam is manmade. It began operating in 1918. How in the hell did the bats find it in the first place? I can only imagine that one bat wandered over, told his friends, and the rest is history.


In the summer, the bats take to the trees. Man-Bat used to scare the crap out of me as a kid.


See you at the movies.


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