Prepare Yourself For The BAT-NADO
This week we venture to the Texas hill country where 8 to 15 million bats are about to wake up.
Helloooooooo subscribers! Today, I have a special treat for you.
I recently traveled to Texas to meet one of the animals featured in my upcoming book, SORT OF FUNNY FIELD GUIDES (which is due to be published by National Geographic in 2025). They’re itty. They’re bitty. But they are legion.
What they also are is millions and millions of migrating, Mexican free-tailed bat mommas—the largest such aggregation of bats found, well, anywhere on this planet. And you don’t have to venture to Antarctica or the Serengeti to see them. Nope, they’re half an hour outside of San Antonio. You can even grab a Whataburger on the way.
Special thanks to Winifred Frick, Fran Hutchins, and the good folks of Bats Conservation International, which kindly facilitated this video. By the way, if you’re looking for a wildlife nonprofit to funnel your funds toward, this would be an excellent one!
Also by the way—if you know why this video gets slightly pixelated at certain points, I’d love to hear from you. I’m winging this videography thing, as if you couldn’t tell, and I had to cap my time investment after the third upload resulted in the exact same pixelation. Alas.
So, It’s Been Awhile…
I know, and I’m sorry. Life has just been bonkers. In a really good way, but bonkers still. So let’s get you all caught up. Since I last wrote to you, I had a little ditty about the weird-wonderfulness of glass frogs publish in the front of the May issue of National Geographic Magazine. I discovered it was on newstands while at the airport, actually.
I got to talk about why Reading Is A Superpower with elementary school kids at a Title I night at a nearby school. My three kids even got to sit in the front row!
And I got to lead 4th graders on nature hikes behind their school where we learned to discover the hidden wildlife gems scattered all around us. In just half an hour and without traveling more than a stone’s throw from the parking lot where their buses gather, we found herons, hawks, morel mushrooms, pileated woodpecker cavities, mayapples, velvet mites, daddy longlegs, isopods, leaf-miners, a robin’s nest, and a four-foot ratsnake. There’s just so much all around us at all times, if we only learn how to look…
By the way, if you’re a teacher or school administrator interested in any of the above, feel free to get in touch! I didn’t know “science writing” was a thing when I was a kid, so I’m trying to plant the seed with the next generation that this is not only A Thing You Can Do, but that it’s a Thing You Can Do For A Living. I also have a presentation on why Reading Is A Superpower, and all of it swirls around the larger idea that animals are a gateway to greater scientific literacy. (I don’t use those words of course—their eyes would glaze over. But you know what I mean… or if you don’t, hire me and find out!)
Finally, I also got to travel to Boston for the 40th anniversary of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, which is just an absolute powerhouse of brilliance. I remain positively mind-boggled that I got to participate in such a thing—the timing and support of which was absolutely life-changing for me.
Next Up: One of the Rarest Birds On Earth
Bats aren’t the only amazing animal I got to lay eyes upon in Texas. In the next installment of this newsletter, we’re going to meet one of the rarest birds on earth. And maybe, if you’re good, I’ll let you watch them DANCE.
Thank you so much for tagging along with me on this journey, which has been a lot of hard work, but so, so much fun. Today, I have the privilege of sitting down and writing about monarch butterflies, which like the bats, migrate by the MILLIONS to one small patch of forest in the Mexican highlands. Without seeing such a thing in person, it’s truly tough to imagine, so earlier this week I spoke with Jorge Rickards, Director General at WWF México. And the thing he said that I just can’t get out of my head?
Each monarch is paper-thin and nearly weightless, but when they arrive en masse, there are so many butterflies huddled together that the branches of the trees they rest upon actually buckle beneath their collective weight.
Not to get too sappy, but I think there’s an motivational poster hiding in that statement. Like, you may sometimes feel as if you’re at the mercy of the wind or that, no matter what you do, you just can’t seem to fly in a straight path. But hidden within your exoskeleton is enough power to propel you from Canada to Mexico, if you so wish. And all around you, there are tiny, beautiful butterflies flapping their wings against the same things.
And don’t forget: When we all land together, we can make the giants quake.
Don’t mind me, I think I’m still coming down off the high of standing in the middle of a million-mammal-maelstrom.