In the mid-1990s, we attended at special field trip hosted by a newly-formed organization, Hawks Aloft, to visit a Ted Turner owned property in central New Mexico to see Swainson's Hawks preying on flying bats. The Armenderas Ranch has a remote lava flow on the property, where hundreds of thousands of Mexican Free Tailed Bats live in a lava tube. As the sun sets, the flight of bats begins, triggering sharp screams from the hawks as they also take to the air for a nightly feeding. They fly into the cloud of bats, catching them with their talons and lifting their prey to their beaks. The bats are quickly bitten through their chests, and dropped to the ground. The feeding continues until all of the bats have departed across the desert for the night. We photographed the event. Years later, the slides (remember them?) were scanned onto an old computer. I ran across them the other day and had to paint this dramatic scene. I found that my seldom used pthalo blue was the right color for the evening sky. The shrub in the foreground is a Creosote Bush, which spreads across arid desert lands. All of the shrubs are part of one massive organism. I used a sheet of Legion hot press paper, which was very nice; bright white with a lovely smooth finish.
Bats and only 3 birds.