We enjoy watching the bats each night, and have gotten rather familiar with their routine. They first start appearing at our feeders around 6:30 p.m., with a period of pretty great activity between 7 and 8, but only at one feeder -- the one below the tree, pictured below -- at that time.
if you enlarge this photo (click it to enlarge) you will be able to see the bat's tongue, a thin red line from his mouth to the flower! Very cool!!!
Not until 10 or so do they start hitting the two feeders by our back door, and the activity level from that point on is pretty high. We've seen up to 7 at one time, but counting them is really difficult because of how fast they are, and because we only watch one feeder at a time.
three at once...
two at a time...note the detail in the wing on the lower bat
With the number and duration of their evening, the bats who visit us manage to drain the three feeders by morning, thus drinking more in a night than the hummingbirds and other birds do in a day. We now "top off" the feeders in the evening for the bats, if the hummingbirds have made a significant dent in the water level, and of course then we refill them in the morning for the birds. We go through quite a bit of sugar this way, making sugar water twice daily for three feeders!
on approach...
holding on for a nice, long drink....
We never tire of watching the bats, our own personal nature show! This beats Discovery Channel any day, I think!
