home sweet home

my marmot aeros tent is fabulous.

young spotted ground squirrel

Spotted ground squirrels are often found in areas where prairie dogs are living (or lived, in cases where prairie dogs have been extirpated). In Arizona, they live in a variety of habitats, desert to mountain meadows. Their burrows are generally found in sandy soils. In southeastern Arizona they are associated with mesquite and acacia. In northern Arizona, they live among sagebrush and saltbush. This photo taken at the Ladder Ranch, near Truth or Consequences New Mexico. They've been observed feeding on: insects, a variety of seeds (saltbush, mesquite, sunflower, wild gourd), grasshoppers, and the pulp of cacti. 

elk sighting

This bull elk along with another bull and a cow sauntered near our camp. Each night we could hear the elk bugling and bellowing - as bull elk attempt to establish a small herd of females. 

black tailed prairie dogs - on the move

Arizona's black tailed prairie dog translocation project is underway. We are preparing to trap prairie dogs at Ted Turner's Ladder Ranch, near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. For the next several days, we'll continue the "pre-baiting" phase, which involves baiting traps and allowing the prairie dogs to get used to entering the traps without getting caught. The bait consists of a mixture of sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and sweet oats. After about a week of pre-baiting, the traps will be set and the dogs will be caught within a couple days (theoretically). The traps we use are called "live traps" because they don't cause harm. 

the beginning of the North American Bat Conservation Alliance

Last week a bit of history was made at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. A workshop was held to kick off an international effort on behalf of North American bat conservation. Sure, going out to do surveys and monitoring is important, but real progress is made when a group of people are all dedicated to a common goal. This marks the beginning of NABCA and of a more coordinated effort to make progress for bat conservation among state and federal wildlife agencies and our many partners across the continent.

Corynorhinus townsendii acoustic call

Eagle Creek Bat Cave, April 2008

Once home to millions of Mexican free-tailed bats, Eagle Creek bat cave provides refuge still to many thousand bats. In the early 1960s, Dr. E. Lendell Cockrum (University of Arizona) estimated there must be 25 million bats living in this cave in southeastern Arizona. The bats poured out of the cave for 30 minutes each night like a heavy plume of smoke before fading to trails of bat wisps that lingered for another hour or so. The cave is located in a beautiful Sonoran riparian deciduous forest. Seep willow and tree tobacco line the river and the canyon is populated with Arizona alder, sycamore and walnut, netleaf hackberry, Fremont and narrowleaf cottonwoods, box elder, velvet ash, and desert willow. Mesquite, ocotillo and prickly pear remind you that as lush as Eagle creek may be in the spring, this desert riparian area will dry significantly in the summer months. I saw 4 black hawks, soaring and calling against the canyon walls; turkey vultures, flycatchers and even a roadrunner, the tail of a whip-tailed lizard hanging out of his beak like a limp spaghetti. The 6 desert bighorn sheep - no rams that I could see - were a highlight. So beige and blending with the canyon rock I might have missed them if it weren't for their spots of white rump. They stood still up on the rock, not precarious at all, just confident. Beaver sign was plenty, plenty of peeled bark and gnawed sapling stumps. No beavers working this day.

In the early 1900s, the Eagle Creek bat cave was mined for bat guano.
The guano was removed from the cave and packed to the town of Morenci by burro before being shipped by train to a fertilizer company on the west coast. The guano mining ended around 1954, but still present all these years later are large wooden rollers, ladders, and chutes. Also, left by biologists in the 1960s, large cages where bats were held waiting for biologists to crimp metal bands on their wings in hopes of learning where they come from or where they go (capturing them elsewhere), or perhaps how long they live.

Why am I here? To see if there are signs that people have been disturbing the bats and gauge the feasibility of constructing a gate at the cave entrance to prevent access inside. Evil people have been known to shoot guns into the cave, killing the bats or knocking their babies off the ceiling to die on the cave floor. Even the well intentioned curious can do a lot of harm by going into the cave, which rouses the bats to swirl around the ceiling. If they feel especially vulnerable and fly outside, they'll be easy prey by the black hawks I saw earlier. The cave, with its impressive visible opening is not anything special inside. High ceiling but shallow, there's no branches or hidden rooms to explore. The bats are the cave's treasure, and they are best enjoyed while seated outside at dusk. Watching many thousands of bats (hopefully the population will someday again number in the millions) leave the cave to go feed is worth the price of non-admission.