Read an Excerpt
EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION
So you’ve gotten a good headlamp and a backup flashlight. You’ve found a buddy and packed your best field guides. Now, join Charles and José on one of our favorite night hikes, something suitable for kids and newbies and old hands alike, so we can give you a sense of what you might expect when you set off on your own nature adventures.
Our starting point is the Palm Canyon trailhead, Kofa Wildlife Refuge, western Arizona. The refuge name comes from a mine (“King of Arizona”), and the preserve was initially created to protect desert bighorn sheep. They are still here, but so are owls and foxes and many other delightful creatures.
One approaches this “sky island” from a saguaro-studded gravel plain, turning off the paved road and heading east toward the obvious mountain range of red rock. It looks like a fortress of stone, imposing and yet hauntingly beautiful. It is April, late in the afternoon. The immediate landscape is rocky and cholla filled, with the stone face of the mountain rising ahead of us. Waterfall streaks on now-dry cliffs are the fingerprints of a hundred centuries of thunderstorms.
As soon as we get out of the car, we can hear the welcome greeting of a cactus wren—cha cha chug chug chug. Wind is from the west, steady enough to lift the sweat away instantly, and it’s about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, with 9 percent humidity. As the day darkens toward dusk, space and texture are each more distinct as shadows crenellate the cliffs, delineating each spall and spike.
Seven o’clock—we have not started hiking yet, but now we see the first canyon bat, and Charles has a bat detector out, a little red box plugged into an iPhone to make the bats’ echolocation clicks audible to our dull human ears. More and more bats zip past—the phone lights up with seismograph patterns of transcribed calls.
What are they hunting? A micromoth, the first official bug of the night and maybe what the bats are after too, perches on the tip of a creosote branch. We can hear but not see two distant great horned owls. Crickets: food for the ear, food for night’s smallest snakes. And now here is a mystery bat—the detector shrugs, unable to confirm identification, so maybe it’s one of the myotis bats, such as cave myotis, a species whose calls are not archived in our ID app. Technology can bring us closer to nature, if used judiciously; there does not ever need to be a sharp divide between human and nonhuman, or “nature” and the tools that enhance our understanding of nature. The authors have fancy cameras (probably too many fancy cameras), and we find that a smartphone is a great tool too. So is a good journal and sturdy boots and an insulated canteen.
Low tech, high tech, and no tech: it all works together. On a night hike, you get to use all your senses and even extend them a bit—so bring along a bat detector too.
With the bats urging us onward, we get ready to start. It’s like being a kid again, doing this hike, since flashlights make anything an adventure. It’s just a half mile up to the end of a short trail where you can see the West’s only native palm trees (California fan palm, the same species as in Palm Springs). We will walk slowly, looking for everything.
After the silence of waiting, the sound of one’s own boots on gravel—SO LOUD. Charles tries to walk slowly, spreading his weight with yoga-smooth steps. It is fully dark now, and the bat detector shows that there is a feeding frenzy overhead. Canyon bats (formerly called pipistrelles) are small and lively, a classic “flitting” bat smaller than some butterflies but more supercharged, more zoomy-zoomy. We catch glimpses just on the edge of the head- lamp beams, but mostly they are out of sight up above us, thirty feet or forty feet above the ground.
And now here is something good: down between two boulders by a barrel cactus, a harvestman spider, also called daddy longlegs, dances into view. Its white leg spots glow bright in the UV light. We are using regular flashlights, but also one that emits ultraviolet light, the better for finding scorpions. Related to spiders, a harvest-man is an arachnid with a regular spider body but extra-long legs, as if it were built out of two different sets of parts.
“Look—” José’s spotlight has caught some eyeshine.
It is a kit fox, blinking and then melting away, trotting down-canyon to look for pocket mice and kangaroo rats.
The temperature balances on its toes like a ballerina. The air is exactly perfect now: not hot, not cold, not humid, and above all, not windy. Still and perfect and silent and arid and exactly, perfectly, RIGHT. It is right for us, as temperate-zone humans, but right for the desert animals too. The day’s extreme heat escapes upward in the dry air, and the night brings a cool breath that makes hunting and foraging more energy- and water-efficient. If we feel like moving and exploring, so do animals.
This is a short trail, and at the formal end of it, we can keep going or we can rest. If a family had brought children, this is exactly the kind of place that is a kids’ kingdom to explore. One thing we suggest you do with or without kids is to sit in the dark, turn off your lights, and just LISTEN. What can we hear? Our thoughts, our breathing, and the ribbit-ribbit of canyon tree frogs.
With lights off comes a chance to use binoculars to see air- planes and stars (and Jupiter and Saturn). José uses a laser pointer to show Charles the constellations. Sirius is the dog star, bright as a planet. Betelgeuse is so red it looks like Mars, but the real Mars is out tonight too, small and orange and dim. There is a smudge that is the Pleiades and a zigzag that is Cassiopeia. Taurus at the horizon, Gemini straight above. Virgo supercluster over the canyon.
After stargazing for a while, José makes a quick circuit with our UV light and finds six scorpions in five minutes, plus some glow-in-dark string and a small millipede, which is a bug-worm with legs, so many legs.
As we walk back we see a wood rat frozen in the spotlight, its still posture saying, “You can’t see me!” The wind now blows down-canyon, reversed from earlier. Typically you get valley-to-peak air flow during the day due to temperature differentials, then it inverts at night. At trail’s end, a black widow spider ducks under a rock and refuses to be photographed.
What else is around? We jump in the truck and drive down the dirt road we came in on. The tally from a few miles of road survey- ing includes
—one pocket mouse
—one kangaroo rat
—two kit foxes
—five thousand jackrabbits
—no snakes (we are surprised by this)
—great horned owls again, probably the same ones we heard earlier
—a sky that is dark and enjeweled by stars, but with far-off human presence: over to the northwest is Quartzsite; more south, that must be Yuma; and all along the western edge of the mountains is a borealis of town-glow blurring the horizon, the collective presence of Los Angeles–Las Vegas–all of the twenty-first century. As a general observation, if you’re starting to get serious about nature study, some species—such as ringtails or pumas or the various bats—may all seem a bit mythical. Sure, they’re in a field guide, but does anybody ever see them?
The short answer is yes—though with anything, you need to be out looking in the first place. After putting in x amount of field time, the authors now have their “go to” night roost spot for pallid bats, and we’ve both seen pumas in the wild, and as the photos in this book show, we’ve also come across ringtails and bobcats and spotted bats. Websites can help (there is a great mammal site where people share location info, www.mammalwatching.com), but it’s mostly a matter of spending time in the field. The trick to seeing new wildlife, from skunks to gopher snakes, is going out and looking for it.
Here at Kofa reserve we’ve had a great night hike (and an equally great road-cruising drive), but now it’s time for dinner. We come back to the trailhead and break out camp chairs and a small stove. As we make chicken tacos, one lone shooting star streaks down, reminding us that day or night, outer space never sleeps.
We hope this book inspires action. We often hear that such-and- such topic is the “final frontier.” Time to add “nature at night” to the list of the big unknowns. From dragonfly migration to which flowers bloom at night (and who visits them, pollinating), many mysteries and questions remain.
In this book, we’ll be sharing stories from average folks who have contributed to community science, and will at times point out areas where your own experiences and observations can extend the conversation. Community-based science, through which small, personal contributions build up to create a larger whole, can add significantly to our understanding of the natural world. We hope you’ll be encouraged to join in, using iNaturalist and other resources we will be sharing.
Finally, in night work and in nature more generally, we feel that human imagination spans both the scientific and artistic realms. Take for example this painting of a legacy tree at night. In our view, Georgia O’Keefe got it exactly right when she painted this ponderosa pine in New Mexico. Ponderosas are among the oldest trees in the West, and this was not just any ponderosa but the same tree under which D. H. Lawrence wrote the story “The Woman who Rode Away.”
Is O’Keefe painting the tree, or is she painting the night sky beyond the tree? Both, of course, and yet neither: some viewers like this because it looks like a mysterious and powerful squid spreading its tentacles (and its ink) into an infinitely dark sea.
Like night itself, the painting is open to interpretation, and like night itself, it invites us to participate in the making of meaning by sharing our own views and experiences.
Thank you for joining us on this journey to encounter nature after dark in all its mysterious nocturnal ways.
