Bats (Yes The Flying Things That Aren't Bugs) Helping My Mental Health
A nice surprise when the meteor shower didn't pan out
Lmao so remember yesterday? How excited I was about finally a night I could watch the perseids near the peak of the shower with minimal moon light pollution and clear skies?
It fucking rained. Like. A lot.
Another year of Perseid persecution upon me and my family etc etc but like, it is what it is. And I think the act of going out there and trying is important. There were more clouds than we were supposed to have with a small potential (10%!!) for rain a few hours after dark but we could see one or two stars through the sky blanket and figured it was worth a shot.
About an hour in, sprinkles started and by an hour and a half we had another one of our (apparently super common here??) "30 lightning strikes per minute" storms. Bonkers shit.
But a neat thing happened before any of that
Bugs were obviously very interested in the warm bodies out in the dark, and that meant that the nearby bats had a fucking buffet.
Taken in April of 2019; a bat flew through my frame as I was photographing the moon and I've never gotten over how cool that was
The Perseid watch usually goes like this: blanket or sleeping bags on the ground, lay as flat as possible and stare up, and if lucky, see about 15ish shooting stars before you go back inside.
We got about 100 bats in the span of an hour instead. And it fucking ruled. Granted they were all in silhouette so I have no fucking clue what kind of bats they are or could even speculate a guess based on like a list of "bats in my state" or anything, it brought us so much joy to be in position to watch one thing zoom across the sky and get a show of completely different things zooming instead. And like, they were close, if we sat up we'd probably have gotten clobbered (and then off to get rabies shots).
But another neat thing about this is that in the last like, month or so I started following the Hourly Bats account on mastodon (@batsbatsbats@social.beeps.gay) and piping that into my RSS feed so I get a regular dose of "here are some incredible, credited, mostly-alt-texted photos of beautiful creatures that inhabit our world". Like, what is there not to love about bats?
They look rad, they fly, they have as much biodiversity as like fucking pokemon (This one is a dog, this one is a cat, this one is a bug, this one is a dragon) and like, echolocation is sick as hell.
In a time where nearly all news is bad news and "good news" is actually just dystopia with a sheen on it, being reminded of bats has done me wonders. That's it. That's the blog post really. Coulda saved a bunch of words but this is how it goes sometimes.
Anyway, thanks for reading. Here's your end-of-post cat. His name is Shiny and for a long time we've called him "Shiny-bat" because his face is longer than the other cats (not really visible at this angle) and he often looks like a flying fox.
