Ghosts of the Night – Of Bats and Men, by Laurent Tillon – Editions Actes sud/Savage Worlds, February 1, 2023 – 288 pages
Among the thousand and one beings to which the oak is linked – a tree whose intimacy and thrilling history Laurent Tillon made us discover in his previous work – there is one particularly dear to the author: the bat. Or rather bats because there are several dozen species in France (European record) and several hundred in the world. The author returns through this book to his first love: forest bats, which he has been studying since the 1990s.
The forest, at night: the opportunity to appeal to senses other than vision and to discover an unknown facet of this ecosystem that might seem so familiar to us at first sight. Laurent Tillon has no equal in recreating powerful and immersive forest atmospheres in just a few lines. He takes us to the field of his research, up in the trees or in the caves, in France as well as in the tropics. Since the caves of prehistory, men rub shoulders with bats, most often without knowing it as they are furtive. Whether they frighten us or fascinate us, they remain, for the most part, still unknown and unloved.
Fascinated since childhood, Laurent Tillon invites the reader to discreetly enter their intimacy to discover animals with abilities far surpassing the powers of our superheroes.
We discover that bats are the biggest consumers of nocturnal insects – the best enemies of mosquitoes! We marvel at their incredible flight abilities and the precision of their echolocation system, even in the deepest darkness, at the secrets of their exceptional longevity and their resistance to viruses. We are captivated by their rich and united social life, and we have fun watching them thwart with confusing ease the author’s attempts to study them, taunting him to fly right under his nose while remaining elusive. And this strange sensation where the roles seem to be reversed, where the man has the very clear impression that it is they who are studying him: the observed observer…
As multiple crises emerge (biodiversity, climate and health), bats offer exciting insights into how to reconsider our ways of living. How can we live more peacefully with bats? An exciting journey in a fascinating universe, both so close and so strange…
Laurent Tillon is responsible for biodiversity at the National Forestry Office (ONF), in charge of faunal inventories, in particular of mammals (in particular bats, of which he is a great specialist) and amphibians. He lives in the heart of the Rambouillet forest, which inspired his last essay, to be an oak tree (Actes Sud, 2021), bestseller in the “Wild Worlds” collection.
