We got up around our normal time and I had my usual breakfast. I worked up a blog entry then prepped the RV to move. Nothing happened when I tried to bring in the slide, so I went out to the battery compartment and jiggled some wires to see if I could get them to make contact again, and that didn't work. So, J and I got to manually bring in the slide — not much fun. We left around 9:25 and went to the Stallion Campground in Caballo Lake State Park to dump and take on fresh water. The dump station was blocked, so we pulled into an open site that had sewer and water hookups and took care of things there. We left around 10:00 and got back on I-25 heading south.

The hills on the east side of Elephant Butte Lake were green, and we had never seen them that way. They are usually brown when we're in the area in the winter. All the vegetation in the area was a lush green. I listened to an episode of Car Talk. We got on NM-26 at Hatch to head to I-10 west.

We went to the Sav-O-Mat in Deming at 11:21 to fill up the RV at $2.659/gal.

Then we went to a McDonalds in Deming at 11:34 so J could get takeway. I stayed in the RV an fixed my normal lunch. J brought out a Fillet-O-Fish and then went online through their free Wi-Fi. We got underway at 12:30 and headed west on I-10.

We turned south onto NM-80 at 1:50 and it started to rain around 1:55. The rain didn't last long, but it was really windy and I was worried that we wouldn't be able to catch any bats tonight. We'll have two bat biologists to catch bats for us, and they use mist nets. They're very fine nets supported on the two ends by poles and they're mounted near a water source (a pond) to catch the bats when they come in to drink and possibly feed. The bats can sense the nets much better when they're blowing in the wind, so a calm night is ideal.

Shortly before we reached NM-533, Portal Road, we passed Tom Whetten going the other way. He organized the bat photo shoot I attended in 2007, and I hired him to do this bat shoot for me. He stopped and turned around and we pulled off so we could talk. They had tried to catch bats last night, but because of the wind they didn't get a single one — I was afraid of that. Fortunately, they had a backup plan to photograph bats coming into a sheltered pond at a different location.

We reached the Portal Peak Lodge, in Portal, Arizona, at 1:45 MST (2:45 MDT). Arizona doesn't observe Daylight Saving Time, so they're effectively observing PDT. My clients will be staying in the lodge and we'll be staying in the RV in their parking lot. Fortunately, we arranged some electrical hookups so we can run our air conditioner. After getting the RV all set, I did some odd jobs around the RV and made a batch of my trail mix.

Bat Photo Tour

We had dinner and a kickoff meeting at 5:00 in the Portal Café. The wind had really died down — much better for catching bats. :) In fact, we decided to go back to Plan A for the bats tonight. I had the special of a Pulled Pork Smothered Burrito and J had Cheese Enchiladas. My clients were nice, and we got them up to speed on how the bat photo tour would work. We finished up around 6:20.

J and I returned to the RV to finish up some things before we got ready to head out.

We met my clients in the parking lot around 7:10 and then carpooled to our shooting location in New mexico. We have permits to capture and handle bats there, and Tim and Bob, the bat biologists, were busy manning their mist nets to catch bats for us.

On the drive back down to NM-80, we saw a fantastic full moon rising. While the orange ball was pretty to look at, and would have made a good subject for photography, a full moon is also bad for capturing bats in mist nets because it's easier for them to see. I don't know why I didn't think about the phase of the moon when I set up the dates for the bat photo tour. Well, actually I selected the dates largely because that's when the first seriously-interested client could make it.

We reached the ranch in New Mexico where we capture the bats and do the photography around 7:30. We set up to photograph the bats in the custom bat/bird photography setup. The setup this time was greatly improved over what I used in 2007. The bats/birds are released in a large area of a flight tunnel and exit through an approximately 20x30 iinch (51x76cm) opening. The opening has eight beams across it to trigger four flashes, roughly pointed at the four corners, via a Phototrap. Bill Forbes, the developer of the Phototrap, is part of the team helping with the bat photo tour. (You can read more about Bill and The Pond beginning with my blog entry for March 25, 2010.) The idea is that shortly before a bat/bird is released, the photographers open their shutters with the camera set to bulb (the shutter stays open as long as the shutter release is held open through a cable release), and then when the bat/bird flies through the trigger beams, the flashes go off to make a very short effective exposure, and then the photographers close the shutter. The exit of the flight tunnel is enclosed in a mesh tent so the bat/bird can be recaptured. The bats usually land on the mesh walls and the nighthawks usually land on the ground, and they're are easy to just pick up. The bat/bird is reflown until it gets tired or until the bat biologist determines that we have detained the bat/bird long enough and it's time to release it back into the wild so it can continue feeding.

When we arrived, no bats or nighthawks had been caught, so we sat around and talked photography and travel. As we were doing that, one of the biologists caught a Canyon Bat, formerly known as a Western Pipistrel, and we were ready to start flying him around 10:15. It's the smallest bat in North America, so after photographing him flying a few times through the big 20x30 inch (51x76cm) opening, we put some props along one side and along the bottom to constrain his flight path so we could zoom in and get him bigger in the frame. We all got some nice shots, and my favorite has him coming straight out the exit (left).

After one flight, we had a hard time finding the bat. We looked and looked, and I finally saw it clinging to Bill's shoulder — apparently he didn't feel a thing. After another flight, the bat landed on J's back and she definitely felt it. I was quite happy that she didn't freak out. J had become quite leery of bats after working at the Centers For Disease Control as a virologist. I think the talk by Tim at dinner had helped J relax. While bats can carry rabies (J's fear), less than one half of one percent of the bats that are flying carry rabies. The percentage rises to about 16% for bats that are on the ground and cannot fly. Because we had a nice strong flyer, it was highly unlikely that he was carrying rabies.

After the bat started to get tired, we stopped flying him and Tim, the head bat biologist, brought him out for show and tell where we could look at the bat close up while he held him and talked about him. Then we tried to take some static shots of the bat, but he was too energetic and kept running/crawling off of the rock where we had placed him. Then we let him go. Because no other bats had been caught, we decided to pack it in and left around 11:10.
We returned to the RV around 11:40. Tom had given J and I a list of GPS coordinates for Elegant Trogon nests in the area, so I entered them into my laptop-based Garmin RoadTrip and then synched them over to our handheld Garmin eTrex Venture HC GPS so we could go look for them and more importantly the Elegant Trogons themselves.