Carlsbad New Mexico lies along the Pecos River a few miles east from where Jim White rode his horse right up to the edge of a mystery.
Jim first saw it back in 1901. A swirling mystery, unfolding every summer evening at dusk since the dawn of time.
Off in the distance, Jim spotted a shimmering black shaft that stretched up into the early evening sky. Like a twisting ribbon, coiling and uncoiling, it swept up out of the earth, a magnificent plume unlike anything he had ever seen before.
A young Mexican boy rode out with the cowboy to investigate.
The shimmering black shaft turned out to be bats. Hundreds of thousands of them soaring up out of the earth in a fluttering plume.
They fly up from a cavern 180 feet down. Some fly through the caves for a mile and half before they shoot skyward.
Bats wait for dusk for their hunt. They peel off to the south from their upward spiral to go find moths, mosquitoes, beetles and flies. Before dawn they’ve eaten tons of food and are back in their cave, clustered on high walls, hanging upside down.
There are 17 species. Most are Brazilian Free-Tailed Bats, also called Mexican Free-Tailed. Their tails are longer than the ones on most other bats. Their fur is gray, dark brown or reddish, their wings narrow and long and their big ears point forward. The Mexican Free-tailed Bat can live for eighteen years.
Most migrating bats spend their cave time near the main entrance. After wintering in old Mexico in Nuevo León, Tamaulipas and Michoacán, they’re back in New Mexico in April. Then they head south again in October.
Twenty-nine years after Jim White first spotted the bats, the land was set aside as The Carlsbad Caverns National Park. It’s about twenty miles outside Carlsbad, New Mexico.
Nowadays there’s an amphitheater where visitors gather to watch the bats come and go.
Early risers can see the bats return shortly before sunrise, when they plunge down from the sky at 25 miles an hour.
