Michael Hawk owns copyright in and to all content in transcripts.

You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “Nature’s Archive Podcast” and link back to the podcast.naturesarchive.com URL.

Transcript creation is automated and subject to errors. No warranty of accuracy is implied or provided.

[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Let’s dive into the enchanting world of hidden wonders that come to life after dark. Our guest today are Charles Hood and Jose Martinez Fonseca authors of the new book Nocturnalia: nighttime life of the Western USA. Charles is an author, poet, birder, and world traveler. And as you’ll hear an exceptional naturalist too. Jose has a PhD in bat ecology.

[00:00:23] And as a result has extensive experience studying animals of the night. He’s also an amazing photographer.

[00:00:28] Today we uncover the intriguing behaviors of nocturnal creatures, such as nectar feeding bats, and vampire bats, scorpions that glow under UV light and the often ignored, but fascinating, small owls. We’re talking hours, the size of an American Robin or even smaller. Observe how even the familiar environment of urban backyards transform into areas of ecological discovery when the sun goes down,

[00:00:52] this conversation is tailored for nature enthusiasts or curious minds, and it’s a gateway to a world, less explored the intriguing and overlooked world of nocturnal nature. So without further delay Charles Hood and Dr.

[00:01:05] Jose Martinez Fonseca

[00:01:07] Charles and Jose, thank you so much for joining me today. I think this is going to be an interesting discussion to say the least.

[00:01:13] Jose Martinez Fonseca: Thank you for having us.

[00:01:14] Charles Hood: Thank you for having us. We’re excited to be part of this magnificent experiment that you’re carrying out.

[00:01:20] Michael Hawk: Yeah, it’s a three year long experiment so far.

[00:01:23] Charles Hood: Well, it hasn’t crashed and burned yet, so here we all are carrying on. This would be like episode 90 or whatever you’re up to.

[00:01:30] Michael Hawk: Yeah. Yeah. That’s about right.

[00:01:32] You’re both very interesting people and the reason why we’re here together today is because of your book, Nocturnalia, Nature in the Western Night, which. To me, it’s just a fascinating concept. So I think we’re going to talk about that, but we’re likely going to stray into some other topics as well.

[00:01:51] Maybe just to get started I’m really interested in my guests, how they got interested in nature in the first place. And. Possibly how you two came to collaborate. So I don’t know if those fit together or not, but Charles, do you want to go first?

[00:02:07] Charles Hood: Sure. There is a, you know, we’ve all heard about bird watchers keeping their bird lists and we know birders and they’re very fanatical. You’ve had some guests. And there are mammal watchers who are equally concerned about seeing all the mammals of the world. And I was on a mammal study trip in Brazil.

[00:02:23] based on a boat. And one of the bat wranglers was Jose, who had a reputation already as being the great Yapook catcher. A Yapook is a water possum from Central America. And then he could dive off a boat and catch these animals barehanded. I knew about that part. So I was talking to Jose on the boat and I said, Oh, you know, I’m interested in bats.

[00:02:42] Oh, I’m interested in bats. He says, and he says, I take pictures of bats in flight. And I’m like, you’re kidding me. How do you take a picture of a bat in a flight? And so he shows me his pictures. And then I said, you got to show him, do this, explain this to me. And he, we take out my journal. He does a little diagram of where the boxes and where the bat is and he says, you have to go to the dump and get some wires from old speakers and you have to make sure you subduct tape on this part.

[00:03:05] And he was getting national geographic quality pictures. And I will say that with all due respect to Merlin Tuttle and all the other great bat photographers, Jose was, and is. Fabulous. And I said, Oh my gosh, Jose, you have to teach me how to take pictures of bats. This is like something I’ve always dreamed of.

[00:03:22] And he says, yeah, next time we’re together, we’ll do it. So we ended up coming, he ended up coming to California and went to Yosemite with me, saw his first snow bank. We went up to the bristle cones to see the great pine trees. And one thing led to another, Jose got into a PhD program and now he is Dr.

[00:03:40] Jose to the rest of us.

[00:03:42] Michael Hawk: I have to ask Jose, do you post your photos anywhere?

[00:03:47] Jose Martinez Fonseca: I do have a website and an Instagram. but coming to a question about how I got into nature I grew up Nicaragua. I lived there until I moved here for the PhD program in 2018. But yeah, I grew up in a really small town, 6, 000 people near the Pacific coast. Near, but not like super close, just like geographically.

[00:04:11] And I always liked animals. And very early, I started Catching bugs and by the time I was in high school, my mom would let me go, you know, longer trips around the town and I started actually a specimen collection and those were mostly reptiles and amphibians because I got a book from my dad that was about herps.

[00:04:35] some of those specimens now have made it to some museums here in the US, but.

[00:04:41] I wasn’t interested in that, but when I finished high school, I actually started an engineering degree because

[00:04:50] I didn’t know anyone else who did biology. So it was really hard for me to kind of like find a path. Into a professional career with that.

[00:04:59] So I started with engineering, but once I was in engineering, I actually met some biologists and because of photography, I decided to move to biology. So I switched universities later and

[00:05:09] that led me to work with some people from Northern Arizona university who were doing bat work in Nicaragua.

[00:05:17] And those were the ones that eventually invited me to come. To Arizona and started the PhD program and now I’m a postdoc, but I still, you know, going catch animals and, or see them or taking photos of them. That’s still like my main goal in life is I, the PhD and all these other degrees or whatever is, it’s just a mean to do more fieldwork and.

[00:05:44] Sea animals.

[00:05:45] Charles Hood: And Jose has been in about 20 books. His work has been in 20 books and then he’s the author of two herpetology books besides our Nocturnalia collection.

[00:05:55] Michael Hawk: Yeah, that’s spectacular. I’ll make sure to link to your Instagram and other resources that you have. And Arizona I lived in Arizona for a little while. I was. More down near Phoenix and really became enthralled with the Sky Islands there. And in fact I really want to do an episode with someone, I don’t know who yet, but someone to talk about the Sky Islands and how incredibly diverse and interesting they are.

[00:06:22] So I can

[00:06:23] Charles Hood: The person would be his wife Erin, who’s doing her PhD on lizards of the Sky Islands.

[00:06:31] Jose Martinez Fonseca: Yeah, my wife’s working with spiny lizards. And they one of the most diverse places is the Sky Islands and the Chiricahuas. So yeah, we’re living here in Flagstaff. So we get to go there a few times a year for her work.

[00:06:46] she’s getting her PhD at UC Berkeley, but

[00:06:49] Michael Hawk: great. Yeah. Yarrow’s spiny lizard. I can’t remember the uh, the Latin name, but that’s the one when one of my first trips down to the sky islands that I saw, and I’m like, Holy cow, what is this thing? And yeah, the diversity down there is just amazing.

[00:07:07] Very cool. So let’s touch on the book a little bit. Tell me about the concept of the book. What was your goal, your audience you’re trying to reach with this.

[00:07:17] Charles Hood: We’re very lucky to work with Heyday Books in Berkeley, and it’s relatively small, but company with a big heart and they do a variety of issues, including natural history, Native American issues, some political issues as well. And I approached them with the idea that half of the day is nighttime, if that makes any sense, it would, You know, and. Get we all think of sort of nature as a daytime activity. We know there are animals out at night. No one’s that ignorant, but all the nature shows are typically done. You know, the zoos are open during the day and we go hiking during the day unless you got lost, in which case you have a different concern on your mind And yet the mammal watchers are out at night quite a bit. And Some of the birdwatchers are too. So my argument was that if we’re ignoring nocturnal nature, we’re ignoring half of the nature that is out there in that I really wanted to try to reverse that and also give people a little more sense of security.

[00:08:12] American culture is really good at making us fearful. We distrust each other. We distrust our environment. And we’re told basically the night is bad and you better lock your door and turn on your security lights or else the night will get you. And you think that’s ridiculous. How did we ever get around as a species all these millions of years if we couldn’t walk around at night.

[00:08:34] And of course, as Jose can verify. You can hike by starlight fairly safely. Now we want to caution our listeners. Don’t get bitten by a rattlesnake. You will regret it. Don’t get eaten by a bear, please. But really out of the thousands of field nights that Jose and I have done together, here we are no snake bites.

[00:08:51] Haven’t been eaten by a bear yet. Haven’t been robbed. You know, it’s like the night is not some inherent enemy to be locked away, you know, lock the door and hide from the night.

[00:09:00] Jose Martinez Fonseca: I know a reason was that we’re both interested in photography and both like to do a lot of like flash photography. And just experiment with like lighting and long exposures. So this was like a good excuse to, to go out and try to get some more unique photography.

[00:09:28] And many of the subjects I study are heavily nocturnal, including bats and other small mammals like rodents, but also amphibians and reptiles. So every time I go to places, I always wonder like, what does place look like at night? And. I always like, you know, go to a nice park and I’m like, man, I wish I, it will open at night and come and see because this frog or this lizard it’s in the range.

[00:09:58] So my wife actually makes It’s a bit of fun of me because every time I was like, she asked me like, do you think this is a good place to be at night? So yeah, talking about coming back later and try to find critters, but it’s true for most places. Like even the trash can outside your house, probably it’s a lot more interesting at night. Just because the animals are coming and look around and we all know the ones in the day, we started a bit with camera trapping and long exposures, trying to find some places that are well known during the day, but not so much during the night.

[00:10:39] Charles Hood: And one of our goals was to photograph bats in a way that’s more attractive. Like we actually use the same kind of reflectors and soft boxes that they use at a fashion shoot. If you know that expression, a deer in the headlights. That’s the one kind of picture we don’t want to take. And one problem with bats, when you are handling them, they’re echolocating, when, just as you’re holding them or right when you release them.

[00:11:00] So their mouth is open and their teeth are showing, and they can look a little bit fierce. So it’s a little tricky. We can get good night pictures of bats in flight with our system, but to make them look less fearsome is, takes a little bit of luck, shall we say. you Take 10, 10 pictures to get the brand ambassador shot of a good, happy, sexy. Don’t mind me. I’m just a great, gorgeous bat picture.

[00:11:23] Michael Hawk: Yeah. Bats, of course, are broadly misunderstood in a lot of different ways. So it sounds to me if I, put a couple of these comments together, recognizing that. We as a society don’t have a comfort with nighttime biology, nighttime activities. And then also maybe as a self reinforcing fact of that there’s probably less observation that’s been done at night.

[00:11:48] So I’m assuming that part of this interest is that there’s a sense of novelty and a lot more opportunity for discovery. Of the organisms at night.

[00:11:57] Charles Hood: Yes. When we were in Madagascar together, certainly we were getting data on bats. That was, you know, we’re just. I’m an amateur technically, right? I’m, just, I’m a retired English professor who sort of knows what he’s doing, but not quite. but we were getting range extensions on bats or noticing details about behavior.

[00:12:16] So for those of us who would like to contribute as community science members, Oh my gosh, just basically documenting what’s around your house and putting it up on a situation like iNaturalist would be so helpful and so productive for the general social community.

[00:12:33] Michael Hawk: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a common theme here in nature’s archive is that we can all contribute to science and in very interesting ways, you know, even at my house. I’ve moth lighted in my backyard and, you know, you see the, you know, the carpenter ants are more active at night and there’s like a whole, the moths of course are obvious and the bats that fly by.

[00:12:54] So yeah, so, so much opportunity. And then you have the advantage of being able to go to some pretty cool places to do this as well.

[00:13:02] Charles Hood: have made it happen, shall we say. What it cost me to go to Madagascar is maybe a different question, but yes, he and I have, I’ve been to Borneo, he and I have been to Madagascar, blah, blah, blah. That’s the whole, you know, trying to make your childhood dreams come true aspect of our collective lives.

[00:13:19] Michael Hawk: But we’ll make it real accessible here today for people that want to get out. And they’re out near their home in their home, whatever to explore. talking about the book, one of the things I really enjoyed about it was how you talk about more than just the animals that are out at night.

[00:13:36] You begin talking about astronomy and meteor showers, and even this really cool phenomenon called noctilucent clouds, which I’ve always been really interested in. Why did you choose to include this? this broader setting of the night to kick off the book.

[00:13:51] Jose Martinez Fonseca: we’re trying to be very appealing to a lot of different Demographics or interests. And turns out we were also interested in astronomy. So again, it was like another excuse to keep trying astrophotography things like that. But, it’s just shocking how many people, are not aware of, like, we’re part of a galaxy, or there’s other stuff out there that you can if you go out far from the city and look up You will be able to see and think things that, you know, maybe you have seen in, discovery channel for a brief moment, but it’s actually just out there, like do you need to do much else than just being a dark side and look up?

[00:14:43] I live here in Flagstaff and I don’t know if you know, but like says, what’s. The first dark sky city in the world, and people in the community really feel proud about it. And, you know, we have some telescopes like the, from the Lowell Observatory that’s where Pluto was discovered.

[00:15:02] And so that the theme of astronomy and some, in some parts, like the social aspect of. the dark sky and how to embrace that. It’s very present. And so we both were trying to also capture that.

[00:15:34] Charles Hood: and Hades, you know, are the two Atlas, they should be adjacent to each other.

[00:15:38] And yet we’ve got some really good astrophotography from either my house or Jose’s house or from nearby, you know, we got in the car, we went a little bit further into the desert, a little bit, you know, out away from the city, a little bit more. And so again, you don’t have to be a professional to have a great experience.

[00:15:54] And we were doing this with standard off the shelf cameras. as we’ve gotten into it more. We have a little bit better, mounts and telescopes, but a basic. A basic eyeball, your basic eyes and a basic camera and a basic tripod, and you can get a great picture of the Milky way.

[00:16:08] Michael Hawk: yeah, it really helps to demystify the night, I think, which fits the theme of your book as well. And maybe also ties into some of the broader ecological concepts that, that I like to talk about. And we’ll probably get into a little bit later when it comes to we aren’t the only ones that look up at the stars and use them for navigation.

[00:16:27] There are animals that do. So I’ll plant that as a teaser and we’ll probably get into that a bit more later.

[00:16:33] Charles Hood: You’re absolutely right. Half of the 11, 000 species of birds migrate and they generally migrate at night. There’s a little bit of summer diurnal night migrators There’s a little debate about how much migration is actually at night the day, but they’re getting a couple of things.

[00:16:47] Out of that choice of migrating at night. And one of which is they get to use that map called the sky, that the star chart is really helping birds to navigate on these long distance travels. They’re also using other cues as well. Ultra they’re using polarized light and smelling their way across the landscape and landmarks, but the start, yeah, the magnetic field, of course the star chart is absolutely as important or.

[00:17:16] Parallel to the magnetic field of these 11, 000 birds, even, you know, of course, bats migrate, even dragonflies migrate. So there’s this great pulse of energy moving across the landscape when we’re busy, not paying any attention to it. And that pulse of energy, all that great flow of life is. Not just the bird itself, but then an entire ecosystem Cause inside the birds are of course, a microbiome of very small things, but even just basic things like the seeds that are in their tummies that are getting distributed.

[00:17:49] You know, when the bird takes off, it doesn’t just void it’s entire body all at once. It’s carrying with it all of this material from the home ecology to the next stop. So think this energy transfer is happening around the world year round.

[00:18:06] Michael Hawk: So let’s talk a little bit about the organisms that are active at night. And we’ve been, you know, bats are an obvious one. We already been talking a bit about bats. And you know, there’s a whole episode that that we had a couple of months ago with David Johnston.

[00:18:23] Where we got into bats for about an hour and a half. we’ll touch on some of it here, but probably won’t get into that kind of depth but I want to take it a totally different direction and reveal some of the maybe overlooked things.

[00:18:35] And you talk a bit about plants and the interesting things that plants do at night. So can you tell me a little bit about. Some of the surprises, some of the things that, that you reveal about plants.

[00:18:49] Charles Hood: are Well we know that some plants are pollinated. And when we say we, isn’t that a terrible term? We whom

[00:18:55] are pollinated at night, generally by Sphinx moths. Although there’s a couple of other options too. And you ask yourself, well, why do that?

[00:19:07] When we have great hummingbirds during the day, but during the day, everybody is competing for the same kind of, whether it’s the wind or whether it’s a hummingbird to be pollinated. So if you switch over to be pollinated at night, you have a different set of possibilities available to you as a plant, but that’s you know, a big white showy flower, like a datura flower is going to get visited by a Sphinx moth, I think many naturalists are aware of that, but you’re working on the book, I was surprised how much the plant itself as a plant is doing at night.

[00:19:35] Cause I was so. stupid. I guess I’ll be honest to say, but it was so ill informed. Like, I just thought, well, it’s nighttime no photosynthesis happening, nothing for the plant to do, but wait until sunrise when it’s going to get active again. And we now know from things like detailed laser studies that the actual Plant itself is changing its structure.

[00:19:55] It’s physical shape is it’s a kind of profile as water moves around the plant. And even a desert plant, like a creosote is actually changing diameter branches and changing its profile. All through the night, even like the way humans have restless cycle in a more deeper sleep cycle, the plants seem to be going through these hour long cycles as they move water up and maybe mend some tissues and then go into a little bit more of a stasis and then begin to move some other water around so that the again the landscape at night is still So Active, still alive, all the processes that we think of as being a normal part of nature, like photosynthesis, these versions of these processes are happening, even after the sun has gone down.

[00:20:41] Michael Hawk: And the more I learn about plants, the more parallels I see to humans because like, okay, any athlete knows that nighttime is your recovery time. So I guess it, it stands to reason like, you know these are organisms that have adapted to our environment and they’re busy doing other things at different times of the day.

[00:21:00] It’s a chance for them to. To do something else at night and be fit that ecosystem. And you mentioned desert plants and the one that comes to my mind, I was fortunate to have a Saguaro cactus in my yard when I lived in Arizona. And it was just barely old enough to start blooming before we moved away.

[00:21:21] And you know, everyone told me that bats would actually visit those Saguaro flowers. And I’ve heard lots of. Desert cacti, maybe other desert plants to are pollinated by bats. And maybe Jose is this a topic that you could expand upon?

[00:21:37] Jose Martinez Fonseca: Of course yes. In the case of Arizona, there are at least two species that are nectar feeding bats. Some people call them the tequila bats because they are also are the ones that pollinate agaves. these are relatively large bats. They have long really long, that’s, you know, the common name, long nose or or long tongue bats.

[00:21:59] And it’s because it’s an actual feature the tongue can be as long as their body length. So.

[00:22:06] They use these long tongues to be able to get the nectar from these big flowers like the saguaro. And while they do that, because this flower is so big, they have to almost get in head first.

[00:22:20] Into the flower into, and that’s where the plants can deposit all the, pollen around in the body of the animal. So it’s not even just the face of the animal that’s pollinating. It’s a, it’s an amazing amount of pollen that can be every time that the bat is going into a flower and really increases the success of the plant.

[00:22:42] Because for a plant like the saguaro in the desert it’s really expensive to, to create a flower. You’re trying to save as much, the most moisture possible through the year, and then you suddenly have this giant flower that is really delicate, it requires a lot of water and sugars and energy.

[00:23:00] It’s actually makes sense that they flower during the night where that flower can lose less water and then you have a very specific pollinator that’s gonna transport the pollen only between those flowers during that night. So it’s even decreases the chances of Missing the pollen in the course of, you know, an animal visiting 10 different species of plants.

[00:23:30] If they’re related, great, this cross pollination. But if they are completely unrelated and they cannot be cross pollination, by the time you deposit your pollen and this pollinator goes into a, or nine species, maybe to lose all the pollen that you have, you’re trying to send to another plant by the time this animal visits the other one.

[00:23:53] So it is all about niche partitioning and how the night has been this like, opportunity to radiate into and take advantage of the space and time of these other animals. even the same animals that can be diurnal and eternal they can have

[00:24:13] extremely different behaviors and so all because of that.

[00:24:18] The more south you go, the more species of bats that can pollinate plants you will be able to find.

[00:24:25] So I think there’s just a function of the diversity of bats and across the continent, but it’s very lucky that, yeah, we have a few species up here in the, US. Yeah,

[00:24:37] Michael Hawk: It makes sense to me the, desert adaptations, as you pointed out it makes sense for a plant to flower at night. So it doesn’t it’s able to retain its precious water better. And then you have these bats that have adapted to be able to feed on the nectar. Do you, beyond the deserts in the Western U S are there are there bats like up in my neck of the woods or in some non desert locations that are nighttime nectar feeders

[00:25:03] Charles Hood: In California, they’re only in southeastern California and along the San Diego belt, so like Anza Borrego, they’re coming into yeah, the southern end of California, it has to do with the ability of the plant to produce all that.

[00:25:19] Mega nectar. So saguaros are obligate, you know, bat pollinated plants, so to speak, saguaros need bats no matter what. But generally up in central California, you’ll have the night plants are typically pollinated by some of the large moths. So the Sphinx moths complex,

[00:25:38] Michael Hawk: Got it. And is that true in other parts of the U S then as well? It’s mainly the moths then that are doing the pollination at night.

[00:25:45] Charles Hood: Texas has got a third, pollinating. Bat that we don’t have in Arizona and California . So go

[00:25:51] Jose Martinez Fonseca: but that will be,

[00:25:53] Charles Hood: go to Big Bend to see another Bat . A good reason to have a vacation

[00:25:57] Jose Martinez Fonseca: there will be only three species of pollinators in the U. S. and they all occur close to the border with Mexico. These bats are in a family that is called Philostomidae and they are the leafnose bats. So the California leafnose is in that one, but the California leafnose is a glenium bat.

[00:26:15] It actually feeds on insects and these are nectar bats. The chunk of their species richness is in the tropics. So. They fade away as you move in, and that’s to the up or down.

[00:26:29] Michael Hawk: much diversity, so many places to look. And when I think of diversity, very little.

[00:26:37] competes with arthropods. And I know that there are tons and tons of different arthropods that you’re only going to find at night, or will at least be most active at night.

[00:26:46] Charles Hood: So we’re going to encourage your listeners to get a 10 dollar UV flashlight, you can spend a hundred dollars if you want. But you don’t need to do that.

[00:26:54] Just get a UV flashlight and go to some open rocky habitat. is fine. Deserts are better and look at the scorpions. They absolutely, the entire scorpion, the pin, the pincers, the tail, the body, the legs, every part of the scorpion glows at night vividly, It’s sort of a lovely blue green pale white, blue green, that with, and You know, when we’ve done a few experiments just for the book, you know, Jose’s found six scorpions in five minutes. It’s just so fun. This is, This is the thing that makes kids love nature.

[00:27:30] Michael Hawk: Yeah. I totally agree. And, some of my, you know, some of the listeners that have heard me for a while have probably heard me talk about this, but I sometimes help out with a field ecology class from a local community college. And we often go to this area called the Alabama Hills, which is in the Eastern Sierra.

[00:27:47] It’s in the great basin desert as it starts to. You know, maybe transition to Sierra habitat, excellent place to, to find scorpions. And I think the thing that surprises me is with black lights, you can do it. You don’t have to just look for scorpions, right? Like there are other organisms that will fluoresce under black light.

[00:28:05] Charles Hood: Well, yes, and I’ve used black lights to look for flying squirrels. You know, there’s, there are three species of flying squirrel in North America. They’re all nocturnal and recently discovered that they fluoresce under UV light and a lot of arguing about, there’s argument about even why the scorpions fluoresce and it’s not entirely known.

[00:28:27] The latest theory on the scorpions seems to be, it may help them detect moonlight and know when they’re physically exposed as like being under a boulder versus being in the open, they’re in the open. They’re going to get predated by a pallid bat or by an owl or something. So it may help them in their sense of who they are out of it in the nature, but.

[00:28:44] That’s not completely agreed upon. So yes, flying squirrels, fluoresce, platypuses, fluoresce, those that you are planning to go to. Yes. if you’re planning to go to graduate school, boy, do we have a great fun project for you? Figure out this whole fluorescing under UV light thing with mammals by all means and publish the great book on it.

[00:29:04] And I’ll be the first to buy it.

[00:29:06] Michael Hawk: And did I hear you say Jose,

[00:29:07] opossums

[00:29:08] too,

[00:29:08] Jose Martinez Fonseca: Yeah, opossums too. There’s a bunch of animals now, and a lot of mammals that are recently being, like, documented to be some kind of fluorescence under UV light. And most people don’t know. It could be also in some, at least in some cases could be just like a side effect for something else.

[00:29:28] So like some pigment that is useful during the day, turns out it’s just close at night, but not necessarily will have a function, but it’s very new. It’s just until recently that someone had decided to go through the collections of mammals without UV light and.

[00:29:45] Charles Hood: Well, there’s a story. Jose, do you remember the story? It was actually lichen specialists who noticed the flying squirrel fluorescing. So it was as a by product of botany in essence. And then, yeah, now you go to a specimen collection and to the so called Pelt vault and get to figure out what glows and what doesn’t glow.

[00:30:06] And then someone can tell us why I’ll be looking forward to that any day now. Alabama Hills. Oh my gosh. And when you’re there, readers and listeners, be sure you go to the movie museum at Lone Pine and learn about all the many hundreds of movies that were. filmed in the Alabama Hills. It’s a great cultural resource.

[00:30:24] And then go up the road, just a tiny drive to Manzanar and see the sad history of America’s concentration camps. So it’s, you get to see scorpions and movies and have a history lesson all in the same. Little Lone Pine radius trip

[00:30:40] Michael Hawk: Yeah, our last trip there in July, just a couple months ago there was a wind scorpion and it fluoresces as well. It’s not related to scorpions. Yeah. So, yeah. So, so many discoveries as to add to the list of fluorescing I think that one was known, but I do see, you know, friends occasionally finding new things that were not known to fluoresce before.

[00:31:03] Charles Hood: and while people are on the Alabama Hill Strip go up to Bishop and that’s a great place for bats there’s a city park there that’s got a pond and there’s a little stream that runs through the pond is through the State through the city park and Bishop and if there’s a baseball game There are a lot of bats feeding around the stadium lights and there’s Yuma Miotis bats feeding on the water if you bring a bat detector, you know, someone with a bat detector You can get six species in half an hour at the right there by Holiday Inn Express and the baseball diamond near the dog park across from Schat’s Bakery in Bishop is a fabulous place to see a whole mess of bats.

[00:31:41] Michael Hawk: I, I know that spot.

[00:31:43] Jose Martinez Fonseca: just want to add I really like that area. I, the first time I visited Charles in California, we actually went to the Alabama Hills and we went also to the Inyo National Forest. So if you go a bit higher in elevation and you go at night in the early days of the summer I actually have not heard them there.

[00:32:04] Yeah, but some people that work there with bats also told me one of the rarest species of bats and mammals in the entire North America can be from there. And that’s the spotted bat. And it happens that this animal… Actually it echo locates like a frequency that is low enough that we can hear it.

[00:32:27] So if you get out at night and you hear like a little…

[00:32:30] That’s the only hearable bat that you’re going to find in, in, in that kind of landscape. And they actually feed on moths. And there’s this kind of arm race between moths and these bats because most bats that also feed on moths, they collocate very, in very high frequency.

[00:32:52] And most of the mods have evolved to avoid or detect some of those sounds and do some like avoidance, like either by maneuvering or just stop flying and just let gravity bring it down. So, and the last moment where the bat is about to catch it, they can like dodge the bat. so what the spotted bat did was you know, all this.

[00:33:15] Bats are echolocating at these frequencies. I’m just gonna echolocate way below that. So I take some moths, by surprise, basically. And that’s exactly what they do. And now there’s this thousands of years, and now there are moths that also can detect

[00:33:34] Or counteract some of the, collocation from the

[00:33:37] spotted bats, but it’s an ongoing dynamic and it’s so rare.

[00:33:41] This spotted bat is like really a unique thing. You I hope people like Google and see,

[00:33:48] Charles Hood: No, we’ll put a picture in the show notes. Jose will put a picture in the show notes because it’s black and white. It has immense pink ears. This is just a fabulous looking animal. And yes, the Eastern Sierra is one of the places in the world where you could go and actually hope to see one.

[00:34:03] There’s another spot up by Crowley Lake a little bit further north from Bishop. So. we think of it as maybe mountain biking or trout fishing or something, but it’s actually a fabulous place for wildlife. Brushy tailed wood rat is something you can see when you go up to see the bristlecone pines.

[00:34:19] There are marmots up there. Chance for a puma, you never know. It’s going to run across your front of your car sooner or later, everybody, has, it has for both the, both of us. If you want to see a puma, the more time you spend out in nature, the better luck you’re going to have.

[00:34:34] Michael Hawk: Well, you’ve definitely piqued my interest on this bat. So I’m going to be looking it up and yes, I will include any photo that you have and some links in the show notes too. you know, in my recollection of the book there’s a point where you also talk about if you’re out at night and you’re exploring and I want to make sure we leave some time.

[00:34:52] to give people some hints and tips and suggestions as to how to do this. But you mentioned looking in water as well. And I remember one of the night hikes I led here in the Bay area last year, there was a very experienced night hike leader Along with me and he went straight to the water and found a giant water bug like right away.

[00:35:12] And it’s cool. Very cool thing to see. And I didn’t really stop to think, well, you know, how come I’ve never seen one of these in the day before, but I think this is another example of an arthropod. That’s as most active at night.

[00:35:23] Charles Hood: I’m going to say tentatively. Yes. With a question mark in my voice, don’t they hide under rocks during the day, but nature’s so complicated, you know, I don’t want to be, you’ll hear from someone, ah, no, they come out at 4 p. m. You idiots. Don’t you know anything on that podcast of yours? Yeah.

[00:35:39] I

[00:35:39] Jose Martinez Fonseca: I know that. I know that at least some species in Central America, they move between ponds at night, so they fly during the night. That’s mostly to avoid predators and because there are great swimmers, but they don’t move so graciously on land. So if they move at night, there’s a bit of better chance to be able to disperse between bodies of water.

[00:36:04] Michael Hawk: And you had an incredible photo in the book of a male with dozens of eggs on its back, which,

[00:36:10] Charles Hood: Yeah, we got that from a woman named Renee Clark, who lives in Tucson. And so again, we’re trained to be afraid of nature, but here’s a brilliant photographer who happens to go out alone just because that’s often her social situation where her day off doesn’t match anybody else’s. And I asked her about that.

[00:36:27] You know, in the book, and she does say, like, you have to be sensible, look behind you, look around you, but there’s no reason not to go do your thing. And there are such amazing experiences to be had if we could just go out and have a little look.

[00:36:41] I was going to just ask Jose, you’ve been out at night as much as I have, you know, or more. How do you feel about being out in nature at night? What does it make you feel like?

[00:36:49] Jose Martinez Fonseca: It’s a lot of like feeling of discovery, I think. Again, it’s like you can visit a place a thousand times, but then the time you do it at night, it just looks completely different. And yeah, you can most of the time recognize the path and But you look and you can find anything.

[00:37:07] Like I did that growing up in Nicaragua and the night is… You hear different sounds different things. Like the trees don’t look the same. And I think in some ways it might have to do with You’re more focused. You cannot just walk and ignore everything around you. You need to use a flashlight and that’s focus your vision to concentrate more on like what is each thing. I will say I always want to be aware of what’s around me.

[00:37:37] So it also triggers Like my vision in a way that like I’m just looking for any movement and any color that is a bit off the main part of the landscape. So just makes it easier for me to appreciate li