Bats & Fireflies

Bat and Firefly

Recently, a shop has opened on George's Street in Dublin 2. It is called Needful Things but I've ignored the warning and have taken to buying editions of a magazine it stocks, an encyclopaedic series from the 1970s called Man, Myth & Magic.

It was in edition number 52 that I read

Among these tribes [of Orissa, now called Odisha, an Eastern state in India] bats were reputed to carry fire-flies to their homes because their children could not endure any other light.

I couldn't find out what kind of bat this story referred to. Odisha is home to fruit bats, which always remind me of my greyhound, Lily (she really does look like a fruitbat), but I thought that the horseshoe bat suited better - I think I just associate it more with fairy tales.

So I did an internet browse, including Bat Conservation Ireland, and did some sketches.

 

Last Friday, I visited the Zoological Museum in Trinity College. It's a gorgeous little gem of a museum, with a collection of beautiful Blaschka models. We watched a short film about the Great Auk and I did some sketches of the bats there.  I won't lie, the bat specimens aren't exactly lifelike, and most of them are in jars.

So, yesterday I trotted over to the Museum of Natural History, or The Dead Zoo, as it is also known. The bats here are easier to see & draw.

 

This whiskered bat was is a slightly different position to the others, with his wings slightly lowered, and  when I looked at him from the side, he suggested an interesting pose.

I went home and drew some more.

The sky needed a few layers of pencil work, so it helped that I had good music to listen to - Jacques Dutronc Hippie Hippie Hourrah; Barry Dransfield The Werewolf, and Sea Wolf You're a Wolf, and of course, Big Block Singsong, Bat.