Merlin D. Tuttle

I remember one time as a child playing lawn darts at dusk in my neighbors yard. I lost sight of the dart and then noticed that it seemed to be flying up, only to realize that it was actually a bat. My friend and I ran screaming indoors, not realizing that game we were playing was probably more dangerous than our neighborhood bats. Over time, I grew to admire bats partly for their contributions to a healthy ecosystem, but mostly for being marvelous creatures. In this wonderful memoir, Merlin show more Tuttle, founder of Bat Conservation International, details his lifelong love of the flying mammals and constantly running up against the fear and hatred of bats in his fellow humans. As a child, Tuttle crawled through local caves to tag migrating bats, his descriptions giving me vicarious claustrophobia. All through the book Tuttle extols the virtues of bats, from consuming tons of pestilent insects to spreading the seeds of plants, and even affecting the mating rituals of frogs. In addition to traveling the world to study bads, Tuttle taught himself how to photograph the animals, inventing tricks of the trade that would create compelling photographs published in National Geographic, or elsewhere. If you love bats, you'll love this book, and if you fear bats, well this book may change your mind. show less

I grabbed this book after hearing a great interview with the author on "To the Best of Our Knowledge." Bat conservationist and photographer Merlin Tuttle writes here about his longtime fascination with studying and documenting bat behavior, and his efforts to protect and demystify the animals. While some of the anecdotes get a bit repetitive here, Tuttle's stories are mostly quite worth the retelling, and his efforts on behalf of bats around the world are to be greatly commended. I would show more have liked a bit more than what's here on how populations have been affected by the "white-nose syndrome" of recent years, but no real matter. Well illustrated with Tuttle's own photographs, quite funny at times, and thoroughly intriguing. show less

I may be weird, but I've always thought bats were kinda cute. Not "ooh, I want one" cute, but they have big round eyes and soft fur and they squeak. So this is a good book for seeing the various bats that live in America (we definitely have them in Phoenix), finding out how they live and dispelling myths that make people so terrified of them. There are even instructions for how to build a "bat house" to draw them. The author is an authority and a founder of a bat conservation foundation, so show more the information is pretty thorough and interesting. If you aren't freaked out by bats. show less

I ended up enjoying this quite a bit, although Tuttle is not the most dynamic writer. That's a minor quibble on my part, though. The book is well done and where Tuttle is lacking in narrative chops he gets by on the strength of his stories, some of which are really a lot of fun. Aside from the kind of hair-raising escapades you'd expect from stalking bats in the wild, he has some really interesting tales of how he got some of his iconic photos, plus general bat lore (which I for one am quite show more into).

Apparently they're very intelligent and kind of affable—most of them are very easy to tame (he gets a lot of shots by recreating scenes from the wild in studios he sets up, and takes a few days to get the bats used to taking food out of his hands so they're not freaked out when it's time for their close-ups sipping from some rare cactus flower). Tuttle definitely conveys the sheer coolness of bats, though there's a certain sameness to the tone of his stories that flattens them out a bit. Still, the content made it worth the read, and if you weren't a bat fan before, this book could definitely turn you. show less