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...

After more than three decades of living in the city, I've recently discovered that Phoenix has its very own bat cave.  But unlike the Batcave of comic book fame, our desert city's subterranean den is populated by real live bats rather than a duo of superheroes.  In fact, it's a seasonal home to thousands of the flying mammals whose nightly departure is as spectacular as any summer fireworks display. As the days recently lengthened and warmed, I started my morning jogs quite early, even in the breaking light of dawn.  During the golf course portion of my run, I noticed several bats overhead, flitting and fluttering as they hunted insects.  Intrigued by the critters, I soon learned that a large colony of bats roost just two miles away from my home. These Mexican free-tailed bats started arriving in the area in the spring, migrating from as far away as South America.  In the 1990's they decided that a tunnel in a Maricopa County flood control project was an ideal l...