Is That A Lark I Hear? A Nightingale? Surprise! It's A Bat

Bats produce "pings" or "clicks," right? They make these high-pitched sounds, too high for us to hear, but when their cries ricochet off distant objects, the echoes tell them there's a house over there, a tree in front of them, a moth flying over on the left. And so they "see" by echolocation . That's their thing. They are famously good at it. We all know this. But now, I want to tell you something you may not know. It turns out bats (some bats anyway) sing — sing uncannily, spookily, like songbirds, with the trilling, the chirping, as if they were nightingales. Listen, for example, to the song of a Mexican free-tailed bat ... When Virginia Morell sent me this song (she's a wonderful science reporter who focuses on animal communication), I thought, "Whaaah?" I've seen these bats. In summertime, you can watch hundreds of thousands of them pour out of a narrow space under Austin's Congress Avenue Bridge, a few blocks from the Texas capitol. They flood the evening air, hunting mosquitoes