Our Porch at Night (part one)

 At this time of year Mexican Long-tongued Bats come up from Mexico into southern Arizona where they feed on nectar from flowers and on sugar water from hummingbird feeders. Bird lovers often get annoyed to find all their hummingbird feeders drained dry every night, but if you have an outside light on so that you can see them it is worth it just to to see the waves of bats sweeping through your yard. I decided I would attempt to get some pictures of them. It turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be. You see, they move very fast, and they don't have wings shaped to make an air foil which would give them lift, so they are unable to hover in front of a flower or hummingbird feeder; they have to keep traveling forward or they will simply fall out of the sky. So when they get in front of a hummingbird feeder, they can only pause for a second to get a quick slurp. That means, first of all, you only get that one second to click the shutter. And next, it is  dark night, very difficult visibility to aim the camera and focus it, in that one second.

We have a porch along the side of our house overlooking the backyard, and that porch has a number of hummingbird feeders on it, so that is the area the bats are attracted to. I thought the solution would be to use our light- and movement-sensitive game camera, which would be automatically tripped by the bats. We tied the camera to a post pointed to a feeder, and went to bed assured that by the next morning we would have dozens of images.

Well, the bats were so fast they came and went before the camera had a chance to see them and so no  pictures were taken.

All right: I decided I would have to sit out there, and trip the camera myself. But it turned out the porch light produced so little light I couldn't see to aim or focus the camera any better than the automatic camera could. So I thought I would make one more try before giving up. First of all, the next morning,  I put the camera on a tripod so I could point the camera at a feeder and focus it by daylight, and then I left it out there pre-aimed and pre-focused. That night (which was last night) once the bats started circling the porch at high speed I sat next to the camera and every time a bat made its one-second pause in front of the feeder I clicked the shutter, and I could see when the flash revealed the bat's brown color and I would know I had timed it right.

The first picture shows a bat from behind, the underside of its head reaching down to drink some sugar-water. The second picture shows a bat from the side.

So this showed the bats, which was our intention, but in the act of going out on the porch in the darkness, something evidently we had not done before, we learned that the porch at night is teeming with totally unexpected life. In part two part of this blog I will show the life we discovered.