Waiting for Angel Bats in Griffith Park.

This is a preview of my Upcoming Attraction blog post on: Hunting bats in Griffith Park!

That alone is probably enough to get your blood boiling, but one of my fellow bat hunters, Gerry Hans, co-chair of the PROS committee, noticed something else, or 2 something elses, in his bat searching area. I’m not sure I would have seen these toads myself (though I hope I would have. Did I ever mention that I have night blindness? Oh, yes, tripping over every tent spike in Girl Scout camp, that is me. But of course that has NOTHING to do with why I like bats.)

Photo by Gerry Hans. Toad climbs tree, may fall down.

Photo by Gerry Hans. Another toad also tries a tree run. Best of luck to both of them.

Here’s what Gerry had to say:

I saw three different toads in Brush Canyon when we were there doing bat survey. Two of them were climbing up the very steep bank on south side of road, about 200-400 ft above Dan’s herp study spot. It was fun watching them climb. The big one fell and started over a couple times. Here’s a shot of each of the climbers. They were about 50 ft from each other, doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. Taken with flash ~ 10 pm, July 2.

(He is referring to Dan Cooper’s animal searches from BioBlitz. I’m still really sorry I missed them, but that weekend was BookExpo.)

For the bat hunt & survey, there were about 15 volunteers, and we split up into small groups and went to various sections of the park with our Anabat recorders. These recorders pick up everything over 30 decibels, which is about the highest humans can hear. (not sure if I got that number correct, but you get the point.) Most of us didn’t see any bats. None of us heard them. But the recorders chirped anyway.

The quotation, “entertaining angels unawares,” kept coming to mind, so I looked it up:

Heb 13:2
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

I shall call these Angel Bats, and you may want to, too. More details to come.