Broome, Western Oz: Look up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s…

My apologies. I know the blog has been woefully silent in the last few weeks. I’ve been working day and night on another big project and have allowed JimandJamie.com to sit on a shelf gathering digital dust. I promise to do better.

We were dining at Aarli’s (clearly the finest restaurant this small beach town has to offer) when Jamie suddenly ducked. A huge fruit bat had swooped directly over our heads.

It was a sign of things to come. We looked up. Moments later the sky was filled with thousands of the web-winged wonders.

We don’t know where they came from nor where they were going, but other than a few stragglers who enjoyed swooping low over the heads of the unsuspecting diners, they all seemed to be heading toward Cable Beach. But we’ve been out there for dozens of sunsets and have never seen huge swarms of bats, so your guess is as good as ours.

The swarm of flying rodents continued for fifteen minutes or so. Thousands of them flew overhead. Maybe tens of thousands.

I was getting ready to make an additional comment about bats being rodents, but stopped because I wasn’t sure that was correct. I think you’ll be as surprised as I was to read what Britannica.com called the bat’s closest relatives:

“If bats aren’t related to rodents, what are they related to? Bat classification is complicated because bats’ tiny delicate bones make for poor fossils. It used to be thought that bats were actually closely related to primates—including humans—but recent genome analysis has classified them in a superorder that includes animals such as pangolins and whales.”

Just think. If millions of years ago the arc of evolution had bent just a wee bit differently, tonight’s evening sky might have been filled with thousands of flying whales.

Now that would have been spectacular.