![]() ![]() From him she learns that there are 35 known singers, and that the music is quite complex at first listen, but becomes monotonous over a season: all whales sing the same song, which evolves slowly year to year. ![]() ![]() Flying to Maui, she is the guest of Roger Payne, the world's most faithful recorder of humpback whale songs. Discovering that females have a clitoris, she asks, ``Does this mean that they can have an orgasm?'' But nobody knows-she's reached the limits of science. Augustine, where she helps determine the reptiles' sex by putting her finger in their cloaca-a cavity in which the sex organs lie. Nevertheless, they are systematically exterminated Australia's government, for example, has managed to kill 99% of their flying foxes (a large bat with a foxlike face). He explains how bats are essential in the life-histories of avocados, bananas, dates, figs, peaches, and tequila. Ackerman jeeps across Texas's Big Bend with him as he photographs bats and speaks of such species as the tube-nosed fruit bat, whose elongated nostrils look like party favors. At her side is Merlin Tuttle, founder of Bat Conservation International (``I could probably raise ten times as much money if I promised people I'd get rid of all the bats in their area.''). In a moment, 20 million bats will rise and fly to their night's feeding. ![]() Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses, 1990, etc.) sits at dusk in Mexico at the mouth of a cave. Fresh and most likable nature essays, first seen in The New Yorker in different versions. ![]()
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