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fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were far more concerned with gold, God, and geography than they were with accurate zoological accounts. Amid fanciful tales of sea serpents, giants, and mermaids, there were also reports of bats that fed at night upon the blood of unfortunate humans and their livestock. Although these creatures were generally described as being hideous, with wingspans of up to five feet, nobody actually took the time to figure out which bats were vampires and which weren’t. The rule of thumb seemed to be that the largest and ugliest bats were vampires—and, on both accounts, the explorers were dead wrong.
    Early taxonomists contributed significantly to the confusion. Carl von Linné (who actually Latinized his own name) and the morphologist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were responsible for initiating a misunderstanding regarding bats and blood feeding that still exists today. With little knowledge of the bat’s biology and no regard for their actual diet, they assigned scientific names like
Vampyrum spectrum
(which happens to be a
really
large bat),
Vespertilio vampyrus, Vampyressa,
and
Haematonycteris
to bats that had never so much as snuck a sip of blood. *11
    Even card-carrying tropical zoologists got things horribly wrong. Johann Baptiste von Spix, curator of the zoology collection at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, had spent nearly three years on a collecting trip to Brazil starting in 1817. He returned with thousands of specimens, many never before seen in Europe. One of these was
Glossophaga soricina
(the pollen-dusted bat I had “swoop-netted” at Wallerfield). Spix described
Glossophaga
as “a very cruel blood-sucker”
(sanguisuga crudelissima),
hypothesizing that the creature we now know to be a delicate hummingbird mimic actually used its brushlike tongue tip to reopen the wounds it had somehow inflicted with its tiny teeth.
    The chiropteran disinformation campaign continued well into the nineteenth century. By this time collectors were swarming all over the Neotropics in an effort to supply the burgeoning museums and private collections of Europe. Even though naturalists like Charles-Marie de La Condamine and Alfred R. Wallace had begun writing more factual accounts of vampire bat attacks, these creatures were still considered to be mythical by many in the European scientific community. The problem was that while the slaughterhouse results of a nighttime vampire bat attack were easy enough to record, identifying the actual bat that left the mess was more of a poser. And, as it turned out, even when the culprit was correctly identified, prejudice got in the way.
    In 1801, in Paraguay, the Spanish cartographer and naturalist Felix D’Azara collected the creature that would eventually become known as the common vampire bat. But even though D’Azara asserted that this was the bat responsible for attacks on humans and livestock, British and French taxonomists thumbed their noses at his claim. In 1810 the same bat was named and described by Geoffroy.
Desmodus
(literally, “fused tooth”) was named for its unique incisors: a chisel-shaped set of uppers and a uniquely bi-lobed pair of lowers. Unfortunately, there was absolutely no mention of blood feeding in Geoffroy’s description of
Desmodus.
Similarly, in 1823 Spix named and described a bat that had been collected in Brazil, but it would be years before
Diphylla ecaudata
would be recognized as a second vampire bat species. *12
    It wasn’t until 1832, when Charles Darwin and his servant observed
Desmodus rotundus
feeding on a horse, that the English-speaking world had a name to associate with the blood-feeding deed.

    The vampire bat is often the cause of much trouble by biting the horses on their whithers. The injury is generally not much owing to the loss of blood as to the inflammation which the pressure of the saddle afterwards produces. The whole circumstance has lately been doubted