Originally published at Jen’s Corner. You can comment here or there.
Last Thursday, Rob and I had the fantastic opportunity to go to Bracken Bat Cave and watch around 20 million bats emerge from their cave to go hunting. Of course, we didn’t see that many bats – we were told it takes almost all night for the entire colony to emerge.
It was incredible. As we walked up to the area above the cave, we first noticed the stench of bat (and, apparently, beetle) guano. It wasn’t too bad, but fairly powerful. After the initial blast it wasn’t very noticeable.
The cave (picture below, also more pictures on my flickr photoset) was really just this huge hole in the ground. Once things started hopping with the bats you could see thousands of them circling the cave mouth in some instinctive holding pattern.
Then they just came spiraling out of the cave, thousands and thousands of them. The vortex of bats created a breeze as it rose from the cave – they were so close you could hear their wings whirring. As more and more of them came out, they began to stream south in this endless river in the sky.
It was absolutely an amazing sight.
Swirling in the mouth of the cave:
Those smudges? Bats.
Swooping around and around until they streamed off south:
More pictures are here!
yinshu
that’s so cool. I heart bats like whoa.
my brother and sister and I used to put up bat houses in our yard.
jenbooks
They were incredible! We still haven’t gone to see the bat colony that’s right here in Austin, under the Congress street bridge. Gotta fix that. :)
indulgent_el
Wow, that’s impressive. Nice photos you took.
jenbooks
Thanks! I was happy that some of them came out fairly decently.
alice_curiouser
OMG. That is SO flippen’ cool. Got a bigger of the third one for wallpaper, por favor?
jenbooks
You bet! The last one, or the second to the last one? (Depending on how you mean “third”)
Click the one you want and it’ll take you to the picture page on flickr. Then go to “all sizes” and you can take your pick! The biggest on flickr is 1600 x 1061, but I have 2256×1496 if you want.
Whole photoset is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenbooks/sets/72157600973120370/
jenbooks
forgot to add – the last one (or one much like it) is my current wallpaper too. :D
alice_curiouser
Got it, thanks! That’s an awesome photo. :)