Flying Bat Photograph

03.13.2008 - Here is my best photograph of a bat in flight. I took this picture inside a customer's home. A bat had gotten inside the house, and was flying around and around. She hid in the kitchen as this bat circled the living room. I could have quickly netted the bat, but I wanted to try to capture a good photo first. Bats tend to fly in repeated patterns. Even when they are outside and about the re-enter their home (your home, I should say), they swoop repeatedly in a patterned loop. This bat was doing the same thing. Thus, I knew exactly where and when the bat would zoom by. On each pass, I took a photo at what I hope was just the right time and focal length. I am no expert photographer, so I had to try again and again, and most of the shots were blurry or missed the bat entirely. Finally, magic! I got a perfectly centered photo with very good focus, and you see the result above. The original photo is much larger with much higher resolution, but I didn't want to post that large a file here. If you want the original high-quality photo, just shoot me an email. I like looking at the arms and fingers that make up the wing, and the thin membrane of the wing and the tail and everything.

This bat is a Mexican, or Brazilian Free-Tail Bat by the way. After I took the photo, I was about to gently net it, once again relying on the pattern, but the bat was tired and landed on the couch, where I was able to gently toss a towel over it and gently pick it up and safely release it outside. The customer thought that this was the end of her "nightmare" as she called it, but no, of course she had a whole group of bats living up in the attic of her home. This bat had simply crawled down the walls and entered through a gap somewhere, and then got stuck inside the house. I will soon return to her house to remove all of the bats (safely and without harm, of course) and then seal up all the openings into the house so that this doesn't happen again.

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