WILDLIFE WEDNESDAY: The Bats of Summer
WILDLIFE WEDNESDAY: The Bats of Summer
Our Mojave Desert is a wonderland of bats!
One of summer’s pleasures—and by August after weeks of 100+ degree days, summer joy wears thin—is watching bats swirl in their evening aerial ballet. It’s thrilling to watch one appear, to be joined by another and another until there are a dozen bats chasing bugs and somehow not running into one another.
One of summer’s annoyances post-monsoon are the gnats buzzing around while I’m bat-watching. The gnats seem to go for my ears (how do jackrabbits cope?), but my misery is a bat’s delight—and dinner.
Sixteen species of bat have been observed in Joshua Tree National Park and many of them range into Twentynine Palms. It is very hard to identify bats on the wing unless you have a scanner that picks up frequencies of bat echolocation signals—or unless you are another bat.
A bat hunts for bugs around a porch light. (Kat Talley-Jones)
Around our house near Indian Cove, I’ve seen pallid bats (I know because one roosted on the house for a few weeks—they are called pallid bats because of their light-colored fur), California myotis bats, and big brown bats.
A bat blitz in the park found the big brown bat to be the most common species, and Barker Dam had the most bat species of the half-dozen gnatty water holes that scientists surveyed.
Where do our bats roost? They live in rock crevices and on buildings and hang from the beards of palm trees in yards and oases. So far, white-nose syndrome hasn’t been found in local bats; this terrible fungus grows on the faces and wings of hibernating bats, causing them to wake up from their winter sleep and use up their fat reserves—the fungus has wiped out entire colonies in the eastern and midwestern states. The Mojave Desert Inventory & Monitoring Network tracks this disease in public lands in the west.
To many people, bats seem the most alien of all mammals because they fly at night and in erratic zig-zags. It’s hard to connect with them the way we might with the local coyotes, cottontails, and antelope ground squirrels.
Bats also navigate by sending out high-frequency signals through their mouths and noses and listening for echoes. Because few of us find our way through the world by squeaking and shrieking at high pitches,1 it’s hard for us to imagine what their lives are like.2
Wouldn’t it be something, though, to sleep upside-down hanging from tiny claws? To fly on leathery wings and negotiate the dark by squeaking and listening for echoes? To swirl with other bats in an intricate dance above desert water holes? To save jackrabbits (and people) from itchy ears by eating all the bugs?
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Some blind people can navigate, especially indoors, by tapping a cane and listening for the echo. Media artist Andy Slater gave a fascinating demonstration of how he does this at the Yucca Valley Material Lab last spring.
Ed Yong, in An Immense World (2023) mentions a well-known work of philosophy: “What Is it Like to Be a Bat” (1974), a thought experiment about consciousness, says it’s impossible for us to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
I've been fascinated by and liked bats since I was a little girl. My mom and dad took my brother and me to a little island in a little lake in Northern New York state. The bats would emerge in the evening. My parents taught us to look for them. In fact, my of my love for the natural world came from lessons that my parents taught. Those lessons were a life-time gift, which I passed on to my kids. Thank you for your work.