In a great find by The Cavalier Daily, an editorial Friday, August 25 noted former Governor Mark Warner’s March 2005 bill naming the Virginia Big-Eared Bat as the state’s official nocturnal flying mammal. In an amazing feat of parallelism, the editorial pointed out the irony that we have a State Bat, yet no one seems to know if we currently have a State Climatologist [see elsewhere on this page]. Uh, great point, but we’re still stuck on the Governor’s bat-inspired poetics.
An excerpt from the poem released by Warner’s office:
We have a state dog and a fish and a bird.
And of the fossil I’m sure you have heard.
So why not a bat?
What’s wrong with that?
The state beverage is not more absurd.
For the record, Virginia’s State Dog is the American fox hound, the State Fish is the brook trout, the State Fossil is a Chesapecten jeffersonius (a type of scallop), and our State Beverage is milk.
Of state bats and fossils we never have heard, but we don’t think any of it is absurd!—Meg McEvoy
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