Waiting for the gang to leave for their nightly feed. They didn’t leave until after sunset this evening.

The Mexican Free-tailed bats have already started heading south for the winter, but we had local press come by to say hi and help spread the word about bat conservation.

We’ve finally gone live on the Bracken Cave cams. It took several years to finally get a reliable internet connection close enough to get the equipment connected. Hopefully they’ll stay functional for a while.

Recently the bats have been starting their emergence anywhere from 7:30-8:30 pm CDT so 12:30-1:30 am UTC, but they do their own thing and sometimes it can vary by hours from one day to another. The emergence is usually pretty steady and last roughly 3 hours but much is in the dark. You can usually still hear the cool sounds of millions of bat wings in flight.

The morning returns are hit and miss as the bats return in spurts anywhere from 5 am to 10am with outliers before and after.

The link is to a local TV station covering the cams with useful background.

The little guy tries an evasive maneuver against the hawk.

Most every night, raptors line up for the bat buffet at Bracken Cave Preserve. The bats pour out of the cave for about 3 hours. he bats exiting is a swarming defense strategy to not getting eaten. When you see a young or sick bat stray from the main cloud of bats, the raptors take advantage of the opportunity. Here is one of several hawks that feeds daily before dusk. After dusk, the owls own the skies here in our little Texas wildlife preserve.

Here’s a happy snap from a recent emergence at Bracken Cave Preserve. These are Mexican Free-tailed bats that are part of the maternal colony that summers here in the Texas hill country. We host the colony of approximately 20 million bats from spring to fall. It takes 3+ hours for colony to leave the cave and they’re pretty orderly about it.