Author: Steve

Drove to New Mexico on Monday. Stopped at Carlsbad Caverns for the night.
We’re through birding for a while, so we didn’t stop for birds. We didn’t
stop to descend into the caverns either. We stopped so we could catch the
flight of the bats. It is quite a spectacle this flight of the bats. The
natural entrance to the caverns is an open pit, with a bat observation
amphitheater built into the hill on one side. In the afternoon, this open
pit is filled with cave swallows darting in and out, chirping and swirling
the last of their bug eating business of the day, before they settle down
for the night. The cave swallows are the warm-up act. Just before dark,
the main event begins. Not a single bat. Nothing. Then, suddenly, four
hundred thousand famished insect eating machines. They can’t come out all
at once. They flow. The flowing swirling mass makes it’s way to the sky.
Out of the pit in a counterclockwise swirl, three rotations, forming a
single undulating stream off into the night sky. The stream follows a fluid
path, not like a stream of water, but more like a wandering wisp of smoke,
flowing away, then coming back. When it wanders directly overhead, we’re
bathed in the fluttering of thousands of tiny bat wings. Each bat weighs half an ounce. All these bats together will consume three
tons, the equivalent of three Volkswagen beetles in weight, of insects
tonight. It takes thirty minutes for four hundred thousand bats to blow out
of the cave. They will feed all night, up to forty miles away, and return
by four am. On the way to the bat program, a scott’s oriole flew across the road in
front of us.

Drove Sunday. Stopped in a forest. Llano River State Park. Had a couple
hours to bird. Can you believe there were more new birds for us to see
there? First off, the purple martins were in the purple martin house.
We’ve seen them before, in Colorado, from a distance. The sighting was so
weak, we didn’t even count it. So, finally, we get to the purple martin
condo that is actually full of purple martins, not house sparrows. That was
worth watching. Checked out the bird blind. Painted buntings around the
feeder like flies. Field sparrow. Clay-colorado sparrow. Nashville
warbler. Yellow breasted chat. Bronzed cowbird. Got a red-shouldered hawk
on a post. An axis deer walked out into a clearing trailed by a line of
wild turkeys. It was like a line of baby ducks following mom. Until they
got out in the open and split up. Scarlet tanager. A vermilion flycatcher
spent hours in our campsite catching bugs and feeding his kid.

Saturday the wedding anniversary found us. No matter where we are each
year, it finds us. We keep track of the birds we see. We’re tracking
anniversaries as well. This one is number thirty-nine on the life list. Another walk on the beach. Dinner at Oceans of Seafood. A few more birds.
Saw the summer tanager and black throated blue warbler. Saw a louisiana
waterthrush out on the beach picking through the seaweed. Time to head north. The Santa Fe job rescheduled to Wednesday, Thursday,
and Friday of next week. We have to get there in time on Tuesday to meet
with another potential client.

Walking on the beach here is something like walking through a dry grass
field full of grasshoppers in August. A wave of motion precedes your path.
Here, it’s a wave of shorebirds. The ever-present and ever busy
sanderlings. Complaining willets, black bellied plovers, red knots,
turnstones, dunlins, the occasional piping plover, least sandpiper, and
semi-palmated sandpiper. Such a concentration of shorebirds. They flush
and swirl ahead of every step, just a little farther ahead than the
grasshoppers in the field do, and they don’t land on your legs. The
pelicans glide silently by. The laughing gulls, in full summer dress, are
anything but silent.

I’m still thinking about Moab. I told of our great adventure, driving on
the white rim road for a couple hours. Stephanie, from our office, is off
to run on it this weekend. There is an independent movie in the works. An
extreme running movie. It will track the progress of several runners
through a year of training and “ultra” runs. What a great thing for someone
else to do so we can watch how she does. Maybe I’ll give it a try….. in
my next life.