Bats

Lulu and I had a bat-oriented night in Davis last night. First, we watched a live presentation starring a cast of orphans.

[flashvideo filename=wp-content/video/bats.flv image=wp-content/video/bats.jpg /]

[All filmography by Lulu. Ginna edited and produced it. The first song is There Ain’t No Bugs on Me by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. The second is Doc Watson singing Summertime. Corky is the name of the woman who handles and tells us about the bats.]

Then we drove along a maze of dirt roads that cut through glistening rice paddies like swollen veins.

Our destination was the far end of the Yolo Causeway bridge, whose underbelly is home to 250,000 (if you don’t include this week’s 125,000 babies) Mexican Freetail Bats.

It was interesting to see how the bats conduct their mass exodus from their roosts. Normally they live in caves, flocking from the mouth at twilight. No caves here, but apparently they still need something symbolic of an opening. For unknown reasons, a quarter of a million bats have decided a certain tree is the “opening,” and they fly along under the freeway from far and near until they reach it, emerging only then. They appeared in four waves. First, we’d see flashes of orange under the bridge as wings caught the sunset. And then seconds later, thousands of the tiny creatures — looking much bigger than they actually are — burst into the open, flapping up and over the tree in a fluid cord that thickened as it spiraled into the darkening sky.

The organization that sponsors this class is the Yolo Basin Foundation. They lead fascinating-sounding trips out into this northernmost part of the Delta, which is loaded with birds and natural drama. Check ’em out. I’d like to go on more little outings.

This is another of my nature self-portraits: