Finding Bats

Bats are not easy to find. They spend their nights in the air hunting for insects, and as day approaches they will find the most inaccessible places to wedge themselves into. For many species, this day time roost might be in a new spot every day. This is a problem if you want to study bats, and biologists are finding a variety of creative ways to locate bats.

Enter the Bat Dog.



CJ, a chocolate lab working as a trained wildlife detector dog, tries to find bat roosting sites along with his handler, wildlife technician Elisabeth Mering in the Coconino National Forest in Arizona. Note the gps unit that will track CJ's evey move.



Once CJ detects the sent of bat guano, he will alert.



Here, tucked under the bark of a dead ponderosa tree is a maternity colony of allen's lappet-browed bats. It looks like chaos, but there are about 17 bats crammed together in this tiny spot.



As night falls, they slowly pop out from under the bark and head out into the night.



Little is known about this rare species.

Photomerge and the Forest

Photoshop has been a trusty piece of software for me since the 90's, and through it s various incarnations I have diligently learned its new features and workflow improvements. One thing I have always struggled with, however, is the "photomerge" feature. Even when I would carefully shoot a scene for stitching together later, I often found that "photomerge" would not quite line up edges correctly and I would end up doing the work by hand using layers.

Not anymore. Photoshop CS3 has made a startling improvement in the algorythm that combines mutliple images into one, large final scene. One of the great challenges for "photomerge" was any busy, complex scene that had complicated tones, textures and color - like a forest scene.

I dug around in my archive for images I had shot for "photomerge" but had never actually combined successfully - nor had I taken the time to do so by hand.

An example: The History Channel sent me to Malaysia last year. The rainforests on the peninsula are hot, steamy and ancient places with asian elephants and tigers hidden in the thickets. Like any forest, it can be quite challenging to make interesting compositions. Add three or four leeches that unavoidably find their way onto your body, and you have even more distractions. I never could get these images to stitch together until CS3.



More recently I ventured into the Columbia River Gorge during an ice storm.



The contrast between the frozen forest and the tropical jungle is interesting.

While the "panorama" is the traditional method for composing stitched images, I often will also make four or more exposures into a larger square. These become impressively detailed image files.





Again CS3 made the process painless and gave very satisfying results.

Learning By Failure

I have been doing this kind of work long enough to know better. It seems like a sure-fire, can't miss photo opportunity. And then, It doesn't work out quite like I imagined.

In this particular instance, I was primarily defeated by weather. The elk carcass mentioned in the previous post was certainly attracting predators, as this wet and bedraggled red-tailed hawk can attest to.



However, the buckets of water falling from the sky combined with high winds meant that water was finding its way into bits of equipment that it normally doesn't. Nothing was damaged, and these camera systems have survived pretty harsh weather before - but several connecting cords were shorted out by water, and a flash sync cable was disconnected by the swaying of tree limbs during high gusts of wind.

Is too bad because there were several nocturnal visitors to the elk, but the cameras recorded black frames. bummer.

I need to re-think my cord and connector arrangement.

When the system failed, it made a last gasp by recording an image in the middle of a nocturnal rain shower.



Please forgive the morbidity of the subject.

Winter Kill

It has been a stormy and cold winter along the coast. I can't be sure if it was the hard time of year, or disease that killed this juvenile, bull elk – but it does not appear that a predator killed it.



Now it is time for the scavengers. When I arrived, it was obvious that they had already started to feast on the carcass. Probably coyotes and raccoons at night, and hawks and eagles by day. In between hail storms, I set-up three, motion-sensing cameras in the muck and mud around the elk to photograph the scavengers.



It will be interesting to see what the cameras record.

Stay tuned.

Coho Run

Coho Salmon have just ended their run to spawn in the various streams and tributaries along the Pacific Coast. Neal Maine and Katie Voelke from The North Coast Land Conservancy were kind enough to give me access, and guide me, to a stream on their property where the Coho spend the last few days of their life breeding and building redds for their eggs.



The stream flowed through a dark patch of forest, where the fish chose to spawn. It is surprising to see such large fish in such small water.



Once they return to fresh water from the ocean their bodies change rapidly. First they turn red, and then very quickly they begin to deteriorate. Males battle for access to eggs while females vigorously fan oxygen over the egg beds. All the while they get more scraped and torn up.



Despite constant rain and gloomy light, I spent hours watching the coho before I could figure out how to take photographs. This was an interesting opportunity to use my remote underwater camera. I controlled the camera position from the stream bank, and could observe the camera's viewfinder using a video monitor. I overpowered the darkness of the forest by using a radio remote (submerged with the camera) to trigger flash units stationed above stream. High water and storm debris made the water slightly cloudy.

But still, I'm pretty happy with resulting images.



The eggs will hatch in Spring - long after the adults have given their lives for the cause.

Cute Little Long-Eared Mouse

My friend BPaul over at the Institute Of Jurassic Technology blog pointed out this little story on the BBC about an An "extraordinary" desert creature has been caught on camera for what scientists believe is the first time. The long-eared jerboa from the Gobi Desert



Well its not as quite as cute, but Oregon has the Pinyon Mouse - a long-eared mouse that likes to eat juniper berries and requires rocky habitat to survive. I photographed this little fellow near Clarno, not far from OMSI's Hancock Field Station.





Incidentally, this is one of the last photographs I took using film.

Tree Farm Color

The storms currently pounding Oregon and Washington have blasted off the remaining fall leaves giving trees the bare look of Winter. Just a few weeks ago however, I was captivated by the fall leaves at a hybrid poplar tree farm.



These are fast growing trees that are ideal for paper production. If they are processed quickly, the produce a brilliant paper with minimal bleaching.

A Rare And Extraordinary Creature – Euderma maculatum, spotted bat

Years ago I heard a biologist describe an encounter they had with a spotted bat, and I remember how impressed I was by the sense of wonder and awe that I heard in that description. Perhaps it is necessary to spend one's professional life in the study of bats to get a sense of the mythical status surrounding these creatures, but I was immediately impressed with the description, and how unique and rare the spotted bat is among bats.

Spotted bats were once considered to be the rarest of North American mammals. Up until the 1990's very few had ever been collected, and most of these were dead or mummified remains. A few live spotted bats were seen, one at the entrance to a cave. However, it turns out that spotted bats are one of the few bats who's echolocation call can be easily heard by the human ear. Once this fact was discovered, biologists eventually found that, while they are still not a common species, they can be detected in many habitats where their presence was completely unknown before.

They fly high and fast in the darkest hours of the night, and they have an uncanny ability to avoid being captured using specialized techniques commonly employed by biologists who study bats. To this day, capturing one is still a rare event, and there are bat biologists who, despite years in the field, have never seen one.

I am still slightly stunned that I was along when a graduate student, working near the rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, caught four spotted bats over the course of two nights - even though he was trying to capture an entirely different species. This gave me a unique opportunity to get some detailed photographs of the the bat.


spotted bat (Euderma maculatum)

Below you can see the pattern of three distinctive spots that give the bat its name.


spotted bat (Euderma maculatum)


spotted bat (Euderma maculatum)

A photograph cannot really show the amazing amount of character these bats have.


spotted bat (Euderma maculatum)

Bats are still largely mysterious creatures - many of their habits and roosting sites remain completely unknown. However, technology is just now giving biologists the ability to use miniature transmitters to track these tiny mammals. The female bat, seen in these images, was lactating - meaning that she had a pup hidden away somewhere. Because this capture presented a rare opportunity to track a mother spotted bat, she was outfitted with a transmitter and set free (the transmitter will fall off after a few days).

The next day a plane was chartered, and Grand Canyon National Park gave special permission to fly into the Canyon with radio telemetry gear to see if the day roost of this bat could be located. After many hours of searching, the bat's location was detected, 17 miles from the capture site the night before, in a crevice in one of the sheer cliff walls of the Grand Canyon. Presumably, she returned to nurse her young pup after a night of hunting insects in the warm Arizona night.

Unexpected - A Flash Of Virescent Color

For nearly three years I have been on a quest to photograph the virescent green metallic bee. They are not particularly uncommon, but they are small and quick - and despite my unusual attention to the small denizens of the insect world, I have only caught glimpses of them.

I had hoped to catch a photo of the tiny creature with my high-speed camera system - which requires considerable planning and time. Good fortune smiled upon me, however, in the middle of an assignment to photograph honey bees.



So I had all of the complex equipment that I use to take high-speed images set-up and ready to go when I spied the magnificent emerald flash of a green metallic bee among a field of flowers buzzing with insects.



I continue to find it remarkable how life on such a small scale can be so vibrant and intense.



This bee also reminds me of an even smaller insect that I photographed last year - the cuckoo wasp. This little insect has an intensely green exoskeleton that is also extremely thick and tough. It must be durable because part of its life cycle requires it to sneak into the heart of a bee hive and hijack a larval cell for its own use. If it is discovered, it will need a thick hide to survive the attacking bees.