A Little Brown Bat in Prescott

Fighting late day traffic through north Phoenix in order to reach Prescott has its rewards. Most notable is knocking 25 degrees off the thermometer's record temperatures. (Yes, it was 110 when I left the desert last Thursday but was not even 85 in the pines less than two hours away.) There are sometimes even surprises waiting for me up there in the form of rain, thunder, hail, and, last week, a bat.

Of course bats are common across Arizona's night skies. Mostly visible at dusk, they zigzag overhead as they hunt insects. However where I never see them is in my deck furniture.

I use a shade umbrella to block the morning sunlight and to keep my Prescott porch cool throughout the day. During the wettest periods of the summer I'll even sit under the wide cover and enjoy the cool raindrops enveloping me. Tall ponderosa pines add to the refreshing atmosphere but the bird activity in the trees contributes to accumulations of twigs, bark, and pinecones, among other things. When I moved the downfolded umbrella last week to tidy up I inadvertently disturbed a sleeping bat.

As it escaped its canvas-covered campsite, the small animal first looked like a bird, cinnamon-colored with pointy, long black wings. But it was sluggish and didn't fly far, pausing momentarily at the base of the nearest pine before taking off to the west. It's wide wingspan, leathery wings, and erratic flight gave it away; it was a bat.

The creature didn't get far, deciding to land and roost under the eave outside my bedroom window. I suppose the bat quickly realized it wasn't even six o'clock with sunset and dinnertime still an hour away.

The bat was tiny, appearing insect-like in both its size and in its remarkable ability to hang from my cabin's wooden siding. I snapped a number of pictures in the dimming, shadowed light, even using a tripod to steady the camera for longer exposures and turning on the flash when I bravely ventured closer.

It's possible the species was a little brown bat. Yes, I know that's more or less how I described the diminutive, brunette critter, but that's also the animal's common name. There's even a sub-species found in Arizona with a scientific name myotis lucifigus occultus which might be an even better guess at an identification. This local population is smaller in physical size and has a distinct sagittal crest or skull ridge which certainly doesn't appear in my photos.

Darkly colored and barely a couple of inches long, my little brown bat disappeared sometime after nightfall.