Batless

Date: October 28, 2007
Location: Bulldog Canyon
Time and temperature: Start - 1710, 91
End - 1900, 72
The numbers:
33 Pictures taken
11 Gnats killed
1 Fly thumped, stomped, and buried
0 bats seen

Ramblings: Remember the pile of rocks that I thought might have bats living in it? Well, I do. I was even able to find it again. I got out there a little before sunset and tried to get comfortable.

I was also conducting research into another puzzling aspect of the desert. Often, when I'm driving through Bulldog Canyon OHV area, I see the side of the road littered with beer cans. It seems that drinking beer in the desert must be lots of fun, because a lot of people seem to do it. I had to find out how much fun it is for myself. So I carried a lawn chair and a small ice chest with beer out to the pile of rocks. I set up the chair on the east side of the rocks, so any bats that came out would be visible against the glow in the western sky (not only does the sun set over there, but Phoenix and its metropolitan glow are in that direction, too). I sat down, popped a top, stretched out my legs, and started swatting at gnats and flies. They've hardly bothered me this whole year. I think they were trying to make up for that tonight.

One fly kept buzzing in my ears, then landed on my leg. I thumped him, and he landed in the wash a few feet away. He wasn't moving, but I knew from experience that he was probably just stunned. I walked over and stepped on him THREE times, grinding my foot each time. There was an inch deep depression in the gravel, with him in the center. I sat down and shooed the gnats away from my beer and watched the rocks. I glanced down and the fly was WALKING AROUND! Super fly! I got a rock and shoved him so far into the gravel that it should take him at least a couple of hours to dig his way out.

It finally got dark and cool enough that the flies and gnats went to bed, or where ever they go at night. I relaxed and watched the rocks and the mosquitoes silhouetted against the western sky. I watched and sipped beer and wished I had brought a long sleeved shirt. I never saw a single bat. Maybe they've migrated already. I'll have to do this again next summer.

It was pretty dark by the time I headed back to the truck. I thought about tossing my beer cans out with all the others to lighten my load; then I thought about growing a mullet, jacking my truck up, and putting a really loud muffler on it. I didn't have a gun with me to kill the cans, though, so I packed them up. The moon wasn't up yet, and it was too dark to walk without a flashlight. I would have been tripping over brittle bush and cholla. Fortunately, I had the headlight that Suzanne gave me for my birthday. It's an LED flashlight on a headband. It looks really geeky, but is is so handy in the desert at night when you have a chair in one hand and an ice chest in the other. The bad thing is, it isn't real bright. I could only see about 15 or 20 feet, and everything was a ghostly gray. Nothing looked familiar, but I always try to go to different places, so things usually don't look familiar. I used Alex's hill as a reference and tried to go south. If I did that and turned right when I got to the road, I would get to my truck. Every time I got to the top of a small ridge, I didn't have enough light to see to the bottom on the other side. It was like looking over the edge of the wall at Grand Cayman. Inky black bottomless depths. Spooky. It was tempting to follow the ridge, but it went the wrong way. I finally got to the road and turned right. I turned the headlight off so I could see outside my little pool of light. I walked and walked and hoped I hadn't missed the truck. As I trudged along, I got pretty close to a palo verde. The 4 or 5 birds in it took off. I hopped all the way to the other side of the road when they did. Heck, they make me jump in the day time when they do that.

The rest of the trip was mostly uneventful. Drinking beer out there didn't seem all that great. Maybe I was drinking the wrong kind. Desert beer drinkers seem to prefer Bud Light. Or maybe it's the ones drinking Bud Light that tend to throw the empties out the window. Who knows.

BC_2007_10_28