Day and Night

 Day and Night

Night (one).

[We have something special with this blog, and three video blogs that go with it thanks to the tech savvy of my son (but which we being tech-unsavvy managed to publish in the wrong order!),.  I could never have done it. In the next three blogs we will be dealing with mainly nocturnal creatures, and for that purpose we have set up a motion-triggered camera sensitive to extremely low light. These are all movies so you can get a sense of how these animals move.]

Coyotes have been active lately. The last few days virtually every day a family party (the same family every time?) has trotted through our yard, and they cover the distance so swiftly they are already gone before I find what I did with my camera. This is in daytime, of course. They are also out at night, and maybe spend much more time in the yard. When we get a glimpse of them when the light is failing, they are not running together. They are widely separated from each other, often not  in sight of each other; I imagine (though I have never seen it) this is their strategy, coming on several paths, trying to  get a rabbit to run at a sharp angle from a close coyote and end up running right into one of the others.

 Night (two)

Also active right now (though we've only glimpsed them) are the Mexican Long-tongued Bats. These are nectar-drinking bats that would normally use their long tongues to drink the nectar out of flowers, but once they come up from Mexico into Arizona (with all its animal lovers) they immediately switch over to hummingbird feeders. We have half a dozen feeders up that we diligently fill every morning, and the next morning they are flat empty with a sort zoo-like smell smeared all over them. 

If we set up a strong flashlight on the windowsill in our bedroom that points at one of those round see-through plastic hummingbird feeders, when the bats are at their peak, it looks like Pearl Harbor with the Japanese Zeros circling at top speed. The bats are circling with every moment one or two one of them pausing with its mouth at one of the multiple feeding openings, and if we are watching through our binoculars we can see the long whip-like tongue shooting around inside the bowl. The odd-thing is, they stop for only a fraction of a second, before flying on.

I just happened to be reading a nature magazine which brought up this very thing. It turns out that these bats, because of the design of their wings, are unable to hover in the air. To stay aloft they must constantly be moving forward. If they stop moving more than that fraction of a second, they will promptly fall out of the sky.

 Night (three)

The most notorious of the larger common animals are the Javelinas. They are like primitive pigs, something that should be painted on cave walls. They run around, usually at nights, in packs of a dozen or more. They are quarrelsome, bad tempered, potentially dangerous with their impressive tusks. Their favorite trick is to use their great strength to push over garbage cans, then pull out the contents and spread it all over the street. The reason they are so pig-like is that an early ancestor split in two, and those in the Old World evolved into the pigs that people have  since domesticated and carried all over the world, and those in the New World tropics have evolved into several species of Peccaries. The ones we have that have extended into the southwestern states are Collared Peccaries, named for a white band around their neck. Note, this was filmed during a rain shower.

When we first moved in here Cheryl's family came over from England to visit us for a couple of weeks, and almost every night the Javelinas (they go by their Spanish name here, the word for javelin, presumably referring to their tusks) came to visit us and mop up any birdseed, or newly planted plants, or anything remotely edible they could find, often taking a nap in the middle of the night, and waiting for morning to finish up, and they are so comical that they were perfect to entertain our guests.

But once our guests went home we decided that the Javelinas were doing just too much damage, digging up every new bush we had bought at the nursery and planted the previous day, or eating in one night the ten-dollar quail block we thought would be feeding birds for a week. So we had someone come in to put a guaranteed Javelina-proof fence around our garden.