Honduran White Tent-making Bats with Cope
Honduran White Tent-making Bats: Gaupiles, Costa Rica — when we go looking for the owls with Cope, I always ask him to find us some bats. Honduran White Tent-making Bats roost in “tents” they make by chewing along the stem of large heliconia leaves until they droop down on both sides…making a shelter where the bats can spend the day. They use the same “tent” for a few days and then move on to another, so the understory in the second growth forest where the owls live, is full of abandoned bat tents…the trick is to find one they are still using. Cope is in the forest daily, so he generally knows where the bats have been roosting and has never failed to find us an active tent. Sometimes there will be half a dozen bats under the leaf, sometimes, as it happened this year, just a couple. As you can see from the photo, the bats were not asleep…just hunkered down…but I was not the first one to photograph them…a process that involves getting down on your knees under the leaf without touching the leaf, pointing your camera up at the them, and then getting back up, again without touching the leaf (not aways easy at my age)…so we may have woken them from their nap already. At any rate, I rate the bat experience right up there with finding the owls roosting, and it is one of the reasons I take my groups back to Donde Cope each year. Sony Rx10iv at 115mm equivalent. Program mode with wildlife modifications and multi-frame noise reduction. Light provided by Cope’s flashlight. Processed in Pixomator Photo and apple Photos. Equivalent ISO 800 @ f4 @ 1/250th.