Last year, I did something that I never thought I would do in a million years: I lost my passport while traveling abroad. To make matters worse, I was traveling solo. My flight home was in two days, and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen it after leaving the airport. To set the scene for you, I had been spending the weekend staying in a gorgeous open-air villa at Origins Lodge, a luxury mountainside ecolodge nestled between dense Costa Rican rainforest.
By night, spectral bats leave their roost and swoop through the tree canopy of Costa Rica, wings outstretched as far as three feet wide, in search of prey: unsuspecting mice and rats, birds called motmots, even other bats. Sometimes, after they snag something good, they will fly back home with the doomed victim in their stalactite teeth and willingly give up a meal to another bat inside the roost. At the end of the day, the world's largest carnivorous bat is a rather cooperative creature.
