Johnnie Rose Stout, age 10 of Houston, Tex., for this question:
Are bats really blind?
Your eyes may miss the sugar bowl when it is sitting right there among the other goodies on the table. You may see a sock that happens to be lying in plain sight just where you dropped it. When your eyesight lets you down this way, somebody is apt to say that you axe blind as a bat. But when you see a bat, you wonder how the little sharpie can be blind.
The little brown bat comes out after sundown and darts through the twilight. He swoops up axed, zooms down, darting this way and that among a squadron of his friends and relatives. Sometimes two of the furry fliers brush close to each other. But the little daredevil hot rodder never never have an accident.
A fast flying bat never crashes into another fast flying bat. He never hits a tree or bashes himself against a wall. At the last moment he always tips his leathery wings and zooms off in another direction. This stunt flying, you would think, calls for sharp eyes, even in daylight, but the bat is flying in the dusky light of evening. He and his relatives can also do their daredevil flying in a black as midnight cave.
Perhaps, like the owl and the cat, you might expect that the bat has special eyes to see in the dim darkness of night, but he does not. The bat is not blind far from it but his eyesight is not very good. He is almost blinded by the dazzling noonday sun, but in the dusky twilight his little bright eyes can see just as well as your big bright eyes.
Somehow the blind as a bat expression crept into our language, and just because he cannot see too well in bright sunlight, many people think the little fellow is blind. However, he needs more than sharp eyes to o0 his daredevil flying. And he does have another set of built in flying instruments. When on the wing, he uses his squeaky voice and his leathery ears to keep him out of trouble.
He utters thin, high sounds as he flies. The sounds bounce off the solid objects in his path and echo back to his sharp ears. The echoes warn him in time, and he dodges away. This is the bans own radar system, and he uses it to fly safely through crowded traffic even in the dark.
The little brown bat dozes through the day hanging upside down, perhaps in a gloomy cave. At dusk he comes out to catch the gnats and other insects that cloud the air after sunset. He does not need sharp eyes to see in the bright light of day, but he does need his radar system, those sharp ears and that thin voice which is too high pitched for us to hear.