Bats!!

Had the pleasure of accompanying a colleague of mine to survey the oasis for bats!!!  Great experience, great night.  I knew we had bats, and see some small ones at dusk frequently, but if you think birds are difficult to identify, try identifying something flitting madly about in pitch blackness.

Pallid bat in flight at dusk.

So she had her Anabat - a high tech listening device that detects and records the sounds that bats make as their sonar insect detection mechanism tics into action.  She used the detector while her assistant and I wielded our trusty high beam torches.  We would highlight them as they flew by so she could follow them. We saw lots and lots of small bats that she identified as pipistrelles and California myotis bats.  These are the bats I am familiar with.  As the night weighed in around us, and the half moon started up the dome of heaven, as the stars started to shine, but the sun light was still enough to break the darkness, this great big bat - it must have been 3-4 times bigger than the rest - came floating by.  WOW.  How cool was that.  It was a pallid bat.  It was really big.  I guess I just thought of bats as small, unless it was a jungle-living-fruit-eating bat. Saw several of them fly by.  Then we heard (but did not see) a yellow bat.  This was the bat I was hoping for.  One of them flew by and she detected it on Anabat.  Several minutes later another came by.  I think the third or fourth fly-by, I happened to catch it in my spotlight.   It really has yellowish pellage on the belly and kind of a darker head.

I had a chance to practice with my new camera...quite a challenge catching bats in flight.  Got a couple decent ones, though.

It made my day.  It was a good lesson in stress relief.  I had had a really rough week, and the strain of it was telling on me.  The focus, the night, the moonlight, the quiet talk among friends, the flittering of the bats:  in a few short hours the strain was relieved. I felt better than I had in days.  The lesson:  get your mind completely off what is going on and do something that will focus your mind in a new direction.