Learning to live with synanthropic bats: Practices of tolerance and care in domestic space

Abstract

As bats adapt to anthropogenic environmental change they increasingly interact with humans and inhabit human infrastructure. This article addresses the challenge of learning to live with synanthropic bats. Building on ideas from multispecies studies, we explore the practices and accommodations that coproduce meaningful human-bat cohabitation in domestic space. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in the Netherlands, we find that domestic space is remade in small but significant ways in response to bats. The aim of our interviewees is to ensure minimal interference between human and bat domestic geographies: intimacy can be spatialized at the domestic scale but is best done in ways that maintain degrees of tolerance. Rather than help bats in general, much care-work centres around supporting the inter-generational reproductive work of bats.This sequential sense of ethical time certainly shifts conservation from a done to mode, and recasts home-dwellers as participants in the story of bat survival and intergenerational nourishment.