Friday, February 1, 2019.
“One bat! Two bats! Ha ha ha!”: Brooklyn Nets players and coaches getting ready play defense against bats that invaded the arena during Thursday night’s game in San Antonio against the Spurs. The bats were probably Mexican free-tailed bats. The Spurs arena is a short bat-flight from the largest colony of Mexican free-tails in the world. You can count one for yourself, flying in front of Nets Center Jarrett Allen’s head (Number 31, second from right). Photo by Soobum Im/USA Today via the Washington Post.
Bats stopped play during the Nets-Spurs game last night [Thursday, January 31]. Bats. As in flying mice.Two and a half minutes into the first quarter, what looked like half a dozen of them---they were flying too fast and too erratically to get a good count----swooped in seemingly out of nowhere and zigzagged over the court at head-height, the heads being the players’ so that put them about six and a half to seven feet above the floor, and went about their bat business for about three minutes.
Players ran for the tunnels. Maintenance and security rushed out with towels and brooms to wave them away. One of the crew wielded a long-handled pool skimmer. Spurs forward rolled a towel as if readying to snap out of the air any bats who made the mistake of flapping his way. The Spurs mascot, a coyote who goes by the name of Coyote, charged the bats brandishing a fishing net and wearing a Batman costume consisting of a cape and cowl and foam-muscled gray shirt with the Bat insignia. Richard Jefferson, the Nets color announcer, had fun calling the chase.
“One bat. Two bats. Ha ha ha,” he said, doing a perfect imitation of Sesame Street’s the Count.
A minute later he asked his broadcasting partner, Ryan Ruocco, rhetorically, “Aren’t we in Texas?”
“We are in Texas,” Ruocco said.
“Great,” said Jefferson, “It’s an open-carry state. We’re surrounded by people who can shoot them down.”
Most of the courtside crowd stayed put, joining with other fans throughout the arena to chant, “Ma-nu! Ma-Nu!” Which baffled me until Jefferson and Ruocco explained it.
They were chanting for Spurs great Manu Ginobili who, after sixteen years with San Antonio, 1057 games, 14,043 points, four championship rings, two All-Star games, an Olympic gold medal, and one captured bat, retired last summer just before the start of this season.
Nine and half years ago, on Halloween of 2009, if you can believe it, there was another bat attack in the arena, and Ginobili swatted one out of the air with his bare hand. The bat was down but not out. Ginobili picked it up off the floor and the bat nipped him on his way to hand it over to a maintenance worker to deal with and he wound up having to get rabies shots.
There were no casualties resulting from last night’s incident, unless you count the Nets’ luck. They were up 11-10 when the bats began their fly-over. When play resumed, the Spurs went on and 8-0 run and that was pretty much all she wrote for the Nets. They hung tough. Even erased a Spurs 12 point lead during one stretch in the first half and were leading 97-90 in the fourth quarter with eight minutes left to play. But the Spurs came back and went on to win 117-114.
So, it was a good game. And it was one of those games where I didn’t care who won. I was rooting for both teams. The Spurs are my second team after the Celtics, but the Nets have been growing on me, and I’m really getting to like D’Angelo Russell. They’re 28 and 25 as of last night. They started off the season 8 and 15, but the last couple of months they’ve been playing like real contenders, which now they have to be considered to be, having gone 18 and 10 since the beginning of December, 11 and 4 in January. But after the bats tipped their wings in goodbye and flew off, I watched the rest of the game with divided attention.
I was listening for more news about the bats.
I wanted to know where they’d come from. I wanted to know what kind of bats they were. I wanted to know if bat attacks are a regular occurrence at Spurs home games. I figured they came down from the rafters where they live. I figured they or their ancestors got in the way mice get into a house and found the living arrangements congenial. The arena must seem to them like a cave that occasionally gets noisier and brighter than they’d prefer. The air is probably filled with moths and other flying bug-meals. So I figured there are bats in the rafters and mice under the floors. But I wanted to know what critters thrive in-between. I wanted to know what other forms of wildlife call the arena home. But nobody in charge of the broadcast thought to find out and tell us.
There must have been people there who would know. The head of maintenance whose crew must have to clean up after the bats regularly. Some season ticket-holders whose seats are up in the nosebleed sections. But, nope, no answers to my questions were forthcoming. The bats made a second, briefer appearance, but Jefferson and Ruoco had nothing to report about them. Jefferson didn’t even come through with new jokes.
And I found no good answers to my questions in the stories about the game I looked at online this morning. Then New York Daily News barely mentioned the bats. They tucked them in as filler at the bottom of their story. The other papers worked them in high up (Ha Ha Ha) but only to use them as a lead in to re-telling the anecdote about Genobili and his single-punch knockdown of that one bat.
But the San Antonio Express-News did mention what type of bat Genobili TKO-ed.
A Mexican free-tailed bat.
I did the requisite google and learned a few facts about them from the Arizona Desert Museum’s website.
I learned they’re called free-tailed bats because “[t]heir tails extend more than one third beyond the tail membranes; most other bats have tails that are completely enclosed within the tail membranes.”
I learned they’re called Mexican free-tail bats because “[m]ost of these bats migrate south to Central America and Mexico during the winter.”
I learned they “prefer to roost in caves, but will also choose attics, under bridges, or in abandoned buildings.” Like I said, the arena must seem like a cave, but it could also seem like the underside of a bridge or the world’s biggest attic.
I learned they “choose roosts near water. The water attracts the insects they eat, as well as allowing them the opportunity to drink.” They must go outside to drink. I doubt they can survive on spilled beer and soda.
But most relevant to my purposes, I learned this…
The largest colony of Mexican free-tails in the world is in Bracken Cave. It’s home most of the year to an estimated 15 million bats! And it’s in Texas. Less than 20 miles as the winged rodent flies from downtown San Antonio.
Right now the Bracken Cave bats are somewhere south of the border. They’re due back in March. The bats at last night’s game could have been advanced scouts, although it’s more likely they belong to a sub-colony that doesn’t bother to migrate, and why should they? The place is warm and the air is full of eats.
Update: A little more google-searching just now turned up this post at Deadspin reporting that bat invasions are in fact common in the Spurs arena and that the maintenance crews and Coyote are prepared and equipped to deal with them. The post includes a repost of a story they did in 2015 when Coyote, in his Bat-suit, actually netted a bat.
AP Photo by Eric Gay via Deadspin
Spurs head coach Greg Popovich was reportedly unimpressed. But then Popovich makes a principle of being publicly unimpressed by most everything he sees on a basketball court.
Apparently just as the mice (and, presumably, their larger cousins) get in on the ground floor they are followed by their sorta-natural-enemies, the cats.
The old Civic Stadium here in Portland has a feral colony that has survived through several renovations (https://www.oregonlive.com/pets/2011/04/pet_talk_jeld-wen_field_takes.html). A black cat recently stopped play at Goodison Park in Liverpool (https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/47104907).
Posted by: FDChief | Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 01:09 PM