Free Dark Banquet by Bill Schutt Page B

would have spelled big changes for
Desmodus,
as well as the other two vampire genera. Suddenly, enormous four-footed feeding stations would have sprung up in places where the pickings might have previously been sparse for thousands of years. Additionally, not only would there have been plenty of new animals to prey upon, many of these quadrupedal blood bags would have been penned in, making them super easy to find and ultimately making meal time a whole lot more predictable than it had ever been before. Populations of the opportunistic
Desmodus
would have exploded as more and more land was cleared for cattle farming. The more cows, pigs, and horses, the larger the vampire bat populations that could be sustained by their blood. Human victims weren’t necessarily preferred, but they did give the vampires additional opportunities to feed, long before windows, screens, and protective netting would keep them at bay.
    From the standpoint of the newly arrived humans, it must have seemed like yet another plague had descended upon them, for with the mysterious nocturnal attacks and the gruesome postbite cleanup came diseases, rabies being the most feared. Soon, stories of vampire bats, their gory attacks, and the horrible diseases that they inflicted, were making the rounds throughout Europe, and from there they spread to the rest of the world. What little scientific knowledge there was on the topic became blurred by misconception and misidentification, turning tales of these creatures into an unreliable blend of vampire fact merged with vampyre fiction.
    Unlike
Desmodus, Diaemus youngi
(which resembles a winged teddy bear) has contributed little if anything to vampyre folklore. Perhaps they were once fast and aggressive, and maybe they even initiated flight similarly to their spring-loaded cousins. But now their movements are more deliberately paced and show little sense of urgency. When placed on the surface of our force platform, white-winged vampires would give a little hop or two, then scuttle off to find a dark corner in which to hide.
    Watching
Diaemus
feed arboreally, we saw why they didn’t need to catapult themselves into the air. Approaching a roosting bird from below the branch, white-winged vampires moved slowly and stealthily—advancing one limb at a time—and always keeping the branch between itself and the underside of its intended prey. Once situated beneath the feathered lunch wagon,
Diaemus
picked a potential bite site, usually on the bird’s backward-pointing big toe (i.e., the hallux). This made perfect sense, since feeding from this particular digit kept the bat better hidden from above than if it had chosen to feed on one of the three forward-facing toes. After licking the chosen site for several minutes, an apparently painless bite was inflicted using the razor-sharp teeth that characterize all three vampire bat species. The bite was
never
violent and very often occurred as the bird shifted position slightly on its perch, as if reacting to some slightly uncomfortable irritant. Still hanging below its completely oblivious prey,
Diaemus
began feeding, and within five minutes it began peeing. It did so by extending one hind limb sideways and downward, deftly avoiding the embarrassment of soiling itself while eating. After feeding for between fifteen and twenty minutes, the bat would release its thumbs from a branch, hang briefly by its hind limbs, then drop into flight. Initiating flight in this manner, there was absolutely no need for
Diaemus
to jump, and so it didn’t, at least not into flight.
    On numerous occasions, we did observe
Diaemus
feeding on birds from the ground. Supporting its body in a low crouch (as compared with the extreme upright stance of
Desmodus
), the white-winged vampire was quite adept at hopping around (rather comically) in pursuit of a feathered blood meal. This behavior had not been reported in the wild and we used it to propose that the white-winged vampire bat