Image courtesy of David L. Bozsik - Bozsik Imagery
I’m driving through vineyards and almond orchards on my way to a special location to help a longtime friend and fellow photographer construct his elaborate stop motion set up. He’s going to make images of some creatures that are very fast and only come out, when the sun goes down.
The subject of tonight’s journey is the Mexican Free tailed bat.
Mexican Free Tail bats roosting for until we have all the gear set up to photograph them. Image Courtesy of Dale Jantzen
Just outside of Stockton, California, there is a location where every night during the summer months, these bats emerge from under a specially built causeway and hit the skies in search of food.
And with a colony of about 60,000 bats, each night their insect consumption can reach up to 10 tons of insects. That is 10 TONS of insects, each evening.
Mexican free-tail bat with its almost transparent wings makes a great subject for the stop motion set up by David L. Bozsik - Bozsik Imagery
As much as these bats are the nightmare of insects over a hundred-mile radius, these flying mammals have predators after themselves.
Snakes and racoons are known to get into the roost and can cause significant damage. So much so, that if a baby bat should fall out of the roost to rocks below, the mother will not fly down to its rescue. They do this in order to NOT make THEMSELVES a meal of predators.
In this particular case, each night the Swanson’s hawks and peregrine falcons are also waiting in the trees nearby the causeway.
These birds are looking for their own smorgasbord to begin, when the nightly emergence of the Mexican free tailed bats give the birds and opportunity to be picked off one by one as they emerge into the night sky.
Baby bats are borne at a rate of one per summer season. They roost separately from their bat mothers, as high up as they can. Higher up in a cave or other area will be warmer and this warmth will promote a healthier growth period.
When a mother bat returns in the morning with food, she can distinguish her baby from thousands of other bats just by recognizing the baby’s unique call.
An adult Mexican Freetail bat can weigh about a half an ounce, they are about 3 and half inches in length and their wingspan is about 12 inches.
My longtime friend and fellow nature photographer David Bozsik is at this location setting up his gear as I arrived.
Five strobe units and the Cognisys Sabre to trigger the camera trap.
The spot we are at is under a busy road that was rebuilt about 15 years ago to accommodate this colony of bats.
His gear is somewhat elaborate with strobe units on light stands, a camera on a tripod and a specialized sensor for capturing images of these animals in flight.
There is a river not far from here that is a great place for these bats to find food, so the location is perfect for bat life. I asked David how many bats are up in the ceiling of this area..
Image Courtesy of David L. Bozsik - Bozsik Imagery
They have large ears that help them locate insects via echolocation. This is where the bat emits a call and listens for the echo that is returned to their ears. This system will allow the bats to find flying insects by listening to how quickly the echo is returned and if they need to fly left, right, up or down to capture it.
The bats in this area do an interesting behavior as they start to drop down from their roosts just as the sun sets.
What is the actual set up that David is using on this session:
Image Courtesy of Dale Jantzen
The idea here, is to leave the shutter open for a short time, and the saber unit will fire the flashes when a bat passes through the triggering zone. So as not to get too much exposure on sensor, David has his camera set up this way:
The camera will cycle every three seconds to keep from building up noise on the sensor or if something flies through the shooting zone, the camera will cycle again even if it hasn’t hit the three second limit.
David will shoot about 1500 frames with only about 100 images being successful. So, the percentages are low, but he can always just delete any images that are blank from the camera cycling.
Inputting the proper settings in the flash is an important factor in this whole production
Now it’s a waiting game. It’s always better to get to a location early to set up and in this case, we will be shooting when it starts to gets dark.
The area we are working in has a slope of about 45 degrees and there is no flat ground under this habitat. Large concrete boulders have been arranged under the causeway.
Each step is dicey, since your footing is always on an edge of a rock. The light stands are arranged so that they can be as level as they can be. There are two tripods, fitted with ball heads on each one. One tripod is for the camera and one for the motion sensor to keep the sensor parallel to the sensor plane.
Negotiating these large boulders in the dark will be difficult, So setting up in daylight with worth the extra time.
As we wait, the mosquitos start to feast on any exposed flesh. The outside temperature was about 95 degrees when I arrived, but under the well-insulated road way, it’s at least 15 degrees cooler.
Right now, I’m regretting not wearing long sleeves to give the mosquitos less of a food source but we can start to see a few bats drop from the ceiling and start swirling around. Its go time.
Image Courtesy of David L. Bozsik - Bozsik Imagery
The bats are starting to swirl into a whirlpool of bats. They are gaining numbers as more and more are dropping from the ceiling getting into the whirlpool. It’s kind of like skaters entering a busy ice rink as more and more start to fill up the area. A fact I read the other day was that bats always fly left when they come out of their roost. And its true in this case as they are flying counter clockwise.
Interestingly, no more mosquitos are bothering us. The bats are starting to swallow them up as they begin their nightly flight.
As the vortex of bats gets more populated, its starts to widen under this causeway. The widening of these circling bats now puts several bats flying though the photography zone and the flashes are firing off quite often now.
The bats continue to fly in this counter clockwise direction exposing hundreds of frames as they go by.
After a few more minutes, the bats start to direct themselves to fly out from under the causeway and off into the night sky. Up above, several people gather to see the site of thousands of bats heading out for their nightly feeding.
The sky is darkened for a short time as the bats make a massive cloud, cruising over the river and out into the farmlands.
And just like that, most of the bats are gone from under the highway. A few stragglers, but for the most part, all the bats are gone. We need to load up all this equipment in the dark, before the mosquitos are back.
You can see some of David’s bat photographs at my web site, just go to imagelight.com that is I-M-A-G-E-L-I-G-H-T-dot, com. and click on the The Nature Photography Podcast.
You can also go to his web site: Bozsik Imagery on your search engine. That is spelled: B-O-Z-S-I-K – IMAGERY.
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