Cross-Pollination: First Bat!

I just got back yesterday from another 2-day excursion into the field, this time to the north to Ejido Estanque de Norias, about a 2-and-a-half-hour drive from Monterrey (about 2 hours on the highway and another half hour or so on dirt roads to the community). This ejido is near Rosillo Cave (a suspected maternity cave for Mexican long-nosed bats), and I was there to do an interview with the comisariado (leader) and set up my infrared cameras to monitor agaves for bat feeding at night. Despite a HOT drive (in the upper 90s, with no AC in the truck) and the crazy driving here in Mexico, we arrived in one piece and met with the comisariado in the ejido’s “town hall” for our interview. This was my third leader interview, and overall it went well. I’m learning the ropes a bit more with this whole interviewing thing, although there was definitely room for improvement. I did feel like I did a better job of “tailoring” my questions to better follow up on things that he said, which in my previous two interviews I didn’t do very well (probably because I still wasn’t very familiar with the ordering of my questions or comfortable with “probing” more). However, I still need to get better at asking for clarifications. There were a couple times during this interview when I didn’t quite understand what he meant, and even after hearing the translation I was still confused or wanted more information, but didn’t ask for clarification. I think I was nervous about somehow offending him by seeming like his answers weren’t “good” answers, but I know in the future that’s something I need to work on.

After the interview we drove a bit farther in the ejido land towards Rosillo Cave to scout out a place with flowering agaves to set up my infrared cameras. The environment here is very different than Tepozanes and El Refugio: it’s much drier with desert scrub plants, and flat in the valley where we were monitoring. During the drive to the ejido I hadn’t seen as many flowering as I thought I would (or as many as I remember there being last year during our visit), which had me worried, but we ended up finding a spot several kilometers from the cave to set up shop. Mexican long-nosed bats can fly up to 50 km one way in a night to forage, so being a few kilometers from the cave wasn’t a problem. We pitched our tent nearby, ate some sandwiches for dinner, and then at 11:30pm I and my translator Ana (who that night was also serving as the second camera watcher) went to the two focal agaves and set up the cameras. Given my bad luck with the camcorder batteries, I was only able to monitor/use the cameras for about 3 hours, from midnight to 3am. The three hours of monitoring consist of continuously watching the camcorder screen for bat visits to the agave flowers for the first 40 minutes (when using the “bad” batteries it’s necessary to watch continuously just in case the battery dies and the video is lost), and then for the next ~2 hours and 20 minutes doing periodic watches of the screen. It was such a beautiful night out (in the low 70s) with a clear sky, a slight breeze, and amazing stars, and it smelled like it did when I was working in Texas on another bat project as an undergrad. Definitely not a bad way to spend a night!

At the end of the session I checked with Ana about how her monitoring had gone, and she thought she saw three or four bats visit the flowers, but it turned out later when I watched the videos that they were really big moths…Pooey! But I did see one bat at the agave within the last 10 minutes of monitoring, although I can’t confirm if it’s a Mexican long-nosed bat or not. It didn’t actually visit the flower and instead did a quick “fly by” of the flower, leaving me to think it was either checking out potential feeding spots for later OR was an insectivorous species that was eating some of the many insects that were flying around and feeding on the agave flowers. My bad luck with batteries also continued this trip, with one of the crappy off-brand camcorder batteries dying after only 18 minutes of use, and the fuse to the IR lamp batteries blowing in Ana’s setup towards the end of the night. (I went today to buy more fuses so hopefully they’ll be better next time!)

After about four hours of sleep we were up again to do the agave survey around the two focal agaves, which consisted of counting all the agave plants within a 30m radius of the focal plants, and collecting some data (e.g. height of the stalk, number of umbels with flowers, etc.) of the flowering agaves in that area. It got hot quick and I was happy when we were back on the road when at least there was a hot breeze! During the drive home my mind was racing with many thoughts. In just the two and a half hours, I thought a myriad of different things, both positive and (somewhat) negative:

We had success with seeing bats visiting the flowers! (Although like I said it later turned out they were really big moths…)
I’m learning a lot about the communities and their uses of agaves, and some of the differences between communities are becoming more evident to me.
I still am not 100% clear in my own mind what the point of my work is, or if it’s “enough” to really have an impact on the conservation of the species.
I still also feel like I’m not doing “enough” for either the social stuff or the bat/agave stuff. I feel pulled in two directions and stretched too thin at times, and feel kind of like a “jack of all trades, but master of none”.
I think I stink at introducing myself to the community leaders. It’s definitely partially a language barrier thing and still being awkward with using a translator, but it’s also partially because I have been told by my professors that it’s often best to not bring up things like my passion for bats right off the bat (pun intended!) since that may bias the responses or attitudes of the people you’re working with. However, I sometimes feel like I’m telling a half-truth, which doesn’t sit well with me, and makes me unsure of how to introduce my project. I’ve still been bringing up the bats anyway, for better or worse…
Being the project/field leader in a second language is hard! I noticed that, for example, when we were out scouting for sites to set up the cameras, I couldn’t partake in the normal “chit chat” or small talk about what I was thinking that I usually would with the others since it was hard to think about the logistics and translate a conversation in my head at the same time. This made me feel like kind of like a bad leader.

So you can see that every trip brings new thoughts and insights, and unknowns and excitement! It’s never a dull moment! And despite the fact that I’m not sure if the bat we saw was a Mexican long-nosed bat or not, here’s to hoping for many more bats in our upcoming trips!