Mike in the Wild

As the one year anniversary approached since I discovered a bat cave in my Phoenix neighborhood, I was keen to visit the site again.   Early June was uncharacteristically pleasant, barely reaching the one hundred degree mark during the day.  So it wasn't a difficult decision to head to the site, near 40th Street along the Arizona Canal, to watch Mexican free-tailed bats swarm out at sunset.   Last year, the summer migrants departed their daytime roost in the thousands, in an endless undulating cloud that lasted close to an hour.  It was late June, and the numbers could have included some new fledglings from nests hidden in the long floodwater tunnel.  That's at least one possible reason why the bats departing the cave were only a trickle, maybe not even in the hundreds on the early June evening I recently visited the site.   There weren't enough bats or sunlight to catch any pictures of the creatures except for one of a lone individual that p...

It's hot in Phoenix.  And with the advent of monsoon season, it's not even the mythically-tolerable dry heat you read about.  As a result, even when we desert denizens rise before the blazing sun, the humidity makes outdoor activities uncomfortably sweaty.  But with our air-conditioned gyms closed during the COVID-19 crisis many of us are still nonetheless dedicated to our morning jogs and walks for outdoor exercise.  In this process, I've discovered that daybreak is also the perfect time to find nighthawks hunting insects.  I was running along the Arizona Canal, near the temporarily-shuttered Biltmore Resort, when I noticed especially large swallows darting a few dozen feet above the water.  Barn swallows had nested nearby in late spring, but these new birds were bigger, the size of those toy boomerangs that were popular in my childhood.  I thought quite a bit about these living gliders during the next four miles of my sweaty run, as my deepest...