Kelvic<->animal communication ~ Bat style

by **Brandon Blackwing** on February 5th, 2014, 4:15 pm

So, I was working on a post when a sudden problem came up. My character in animal form has to communicate with some entirely animal bats. I have come across some of these kinds of questions a lot, and I had read some of them a while before I started this post I'm currently working on, but the ones I read were about dogs or wolves,who use a lot of non verbal communication when conversing with each other. However, bats are very verbal animals, using different kinds of screeches and all that, a bit like how humans do.

Now I am a bit at loss what to do. I don't know whether to put dialogue or something else. I can imagine that dialogue probably isn't the solution, but I don't really know how to deal with this situation.

Please help,

Bran

Credit goes to Ollic

by **Gossamer** on February 5th, 2014, 4:41 pm

I worked with bats a lot when I was in college. One of my profs specialized in them and he was always dragging his students out for extra hands.

Bats do communicate on a whole bunch of levels. Just holding one in your hand or observing it in a bird cage you can physically hear them as a human make soft noises and facial expressions, gestures, all sorts of things. When you hold up a device that translate's echolocation into sound waves we can physically hear the room explodes with noise often from just one tiny little bat.

So... as a kelvic bat... you don't actually speak 'bat' per say. We don't treat it like you walk up to Bat A and say 'morning bob! hows it going?' so there isn't actually a DIALOG involved in that manner. What you can do instead is watch, listen, and pick up on non-verbal and verbal cues when the bat is moving, making noise, etc. You can get a general idea of what's going on with that bat or group of bats by observing. As a human, you wouldn't hear the echolocation chatter until you were an actual bat that was equipped to hear it. That might give you even more precise info on what the bats are doing/saying/feeling... but again, its not dialog. Bat's dont have languages like we know people, marine mammals, and bees do. So please skip the dialog. But you can know in general what the bat is feeling, saying, doing... like we can know what other people are doing, feeling, saying by standing around in a mall watching mall rats interact.

Hope that helps.