Where are the bats?

It's been a great year for wildlife in our little corner of exurbia.

The hummingbirds (or bumblebirds as we call them) showed up late this spring, but they're here in force now and fighting each other in the late afternoons for their places at the sugar water feeder outside our kitchen window.

The squirrel population has exploded and this week the rodents have managed to strip every single peach from my tree just as the peaches were starting to ripen. I see chipmunks scurrying around most days, but they have to move awfully fast in our yard and not stray too far from their holes as Scram is a chipmunk's worst nightmare.

There's quite a diversity of bird species visiting our feeder each day. The impossibly bright red male cardinals are my favorites, but there's always something new to look at out there.

Every once in a while I'll see a hawk perch for a moment on one of my oak trees or a rabbit hop across my lawn. In the winter I put suet cakes out for the woodpeckers and a bunch of them find us. I don't see woodpeckers very often in the summer because of the dense foliage, but I can hear them out there hammering away on tree trunks or on the neighbors' siding.

What I haven't seen this summer is the bats. Where have they gone?

I think bats are especially marvelous creatures, and I love to watch their erratic flight patterns as they go after their insect prey. Since we moved to Bayberry RFD three summers ago we have had plenty of bats in the sky around our house nearly every warm night starting at sunset.

But this year I haven't seen any, and I've been looking for them. I've read that there's some sort of fungal infection called white nose disease that has been wreaking havoc with bat populations, but I don't know if it has reached our corner of the universe or affects the species of bat we have around here. I wonder if there was a colony nearby that got killed off or if last year's drought decimated the local bat population.

Come back, little guys--I miss you.

I finally finished Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, this year's Pulitzer winner for fiction. What an amazing writer. What an amazing book. The book is a collection of short stories loosely organized around the central character for whom the book is named. Olive appears only in a passing mention in some of the tales, but when taken as a whole, they all combine to tell her story. The last two paragraphs of the book literally took my breath away, and I made Teri listen as I read them out loud to her.

Strout's book and Project Y both explore a couple of the same themes--isolation within a connected society and the transience of existance, although Strout does it by making the mundane fantastic while I am attempting to make the fantastic mundane. Not that I am comparing Project Y to a book worthy of the Pulitzer--I have no such delusions of grandeur.

I still think the luddites on the Pulitzer committee owes Stephen King. Carrie, The Stand, and The Shining, were all worthy. Too often, the committee recognizes only late in an author's career that they missed the boat and give the award for a lesser work. Faulkner is the classic example of that.

I'm about 200 pages into Merle's Door by Ted Kerasote at my friend Kathy's suggestion. This work of non-fiction is about Kerasote's relationship to a stray dog that walks into his life during a rafting trip. The author does a good job of weaving lots of doggy science in with his narrative and has clearly done his research, even if he's a little too free with his opinions on the subject of dog psychology.

Kerosote is one of those woodsy guys who live in a cabin in the great outdoors somewhere out West, fills his freezer with elk he kills himself and makes his money writing for magazines like Audubon and Outside. He lives to ski, hunt, bike and camp. Kind of the anti-me.

Merle is a very cool dog.

I have a feeling I know where this book is ultimately going. From Old Yeller to Marley and Me to Cujo, in most books about dogs, the title character isn't around on the last page. I really like Merle, so I'm going to be very sad for him when Kerosote relays the inevitable.

I'm getting quite a lot of reading done these days. Since I was a kid, I've always been an indiscriminate reader, plowing through anything that looked the least bit interesting.

In the last few years I've found it harder to concentrate on what I was reading and that it was taking longer and longer to get through a book. I also seemed to be getting less and less pleasure out of the books I did read than I had before. I thought it might be a function of age or a more refined taste in reading material, but it turns out neither of those was the case.

I've only now come to realize how much time I've been spending with multiple electronic devices--especially the television, iPod and computer--while I tried to accomplish other things like reading, writing or talking to Teri. I've cut back on all three of my main electro-mistresses, and I don't have any of them whispering sweet nothings to me in the background while I'm reading now.

Multitasking has been killing my concentration and making me stupid. I still dearly love my iPod, computer, television and books, but I'm loving them one at a time these days. With only one set of inputs at any given time, my ability to concentrate has returned, and along with it my love for reading.