Bats, Man!

[chomiji]

My colleague Bob wrote tomorrow's intranet interest column about bats. (He usually likes to do nature subjects, which is fine with me!) Anyway, I was combing the Intarwebs for .gov/.edu photos that would be OK to use "for educational purposes" and found a marvelous page of photos of a couple of Big Brown Bat in flight, taken in a lab. The wings are just amazing in the way they flex to take the air as the bat maneuvers.

It's also kind of amazing that this "big" brown bat is actually such a teeny creature: here's a photo of a young girl being shown a Big Brown Bat, which is held in the naturalist's gloved hand ... it's so little and frail-looking.

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Ooh, ooh - if you ask batwrangler, I bet she'll let you use some of her bat photos. :D She's the Designated Bat Wrangler for her office building, as they keep getting turned out by construction, and takes some nice photos of them as she feeds them and makes sure they're OK before releasing them. (The latest bat was shown cleaning its toes. Cute!) Tell her I sent you. :D

[chomiji]

OK, I did ... thanks! But the issue is time. I need to get the pic and the article into the system by 5:30 our time if I am going to leave on time. (But why should this day be different from any other day? I haven't left on time unless I had to pick the Young Lady up from stage crew or something for a couple of months, now ... .)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yay! With luck she'll be online. If not ... well, enjoy her pictures of bats and other creatures on Flickr! XD

[chomiji]

She was there! I'm using this one - so cute!

Her bats don't nearly as stressed out as most of the ones I've seen pix of online, and the photos are much better too (and I told her so).

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yaay! And so cute! Bat toes! XD

For my ecology class in undergrad, lo these many years ago, we went on a field trip to Bracken Bat Cave outside of Austin, and got to watch a tornado of bats exit from the sinkhole/cave for over twenty minutes as they left for their evening's labors. (and this was in the off season when most of the colony had gone elsewhere for the season!) And I spotted five albino bats!

Our prof went down and caught one, and lectured us a bit on bat anatomy, and let those of us who wanted to touch it. It was so soft, like rabbit fur. XD It was tiny, too - a Mexican freetail.

[0nolicious.livejournal.com]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEE! ADORABLE BATSIES! Also such pretty, pretty snakes!

I think the "Big Brown Bat" gets its name in comparison with the Little Brown Bat (http://mariewin.server304.com/marieblog/uploaded_images/BROWN%20BAT-768944.jpg) which is even teenier. At my aunt's home on the rez, there used to be a LBB which would roost in the window of the guest room, all the better for one to get a nice upclose look at him during the day; utterly cute and delicate.

[kispexi2.livejournal.com]

I adore bats! I was so envious of a friend who moved into a house with a colony of 500! Mind you, I'm less envious of her having to feed the ones that get separated from their mothers every four hours for two months!

petit_rhino is a bit of a bat expert (and is named after the French for the lesser horseshoe bat. Hee. See me? Full of useless info. :-)

[chomiji]

Wow, so many bat experts! But for this pic, I need a species that would be found commonly in one of the areas in which we have offices, which limits it to the contiguous U.S., because like most of the articles we do on "creatures" (Bob calls them his "creature features"), it's meant to try to excite interest by having a local focus. The text lists the most common U.S. species, as well as giving some basic facts about bats in general.

[blue-hobbit.livejournal.com]

Totally off topic, but I just had to stop by and drool over your icon ^_^

[chomiji]

Well! We have a winner! Cho Hakkai-san is the favorite of hobbit-san!

XD

He's my second favorite. I like Gojyo best.

Aethereality Gallery has gorgeous pictures of all of them (this link sorts them by artist, so there are a scattering of pix from her other series, Wild Adapter and the short-lived experimental Bus Gamer mixed in with our boys).

[blue-hobbit.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess you could put it that way ^_^ Although he still has to battle Sanzo for number one status once in a while (it's the old Raistlin syndrome for me... the antisocial meanies with a tragic past always draw me like a moth to the flame, not very healthy!)

Thanks a lot for the link, those pictures look amazing! Unfortunately I still haven't made it past book 5 of Reload... life just keeps conspiring to keep me away from the manga goodness! Must go down to the bookstore this week...

[chomiji]

Heh - no wonder you broke cover while reading "Down Came the Rain!" ipperne liked Hakkai and Sanzo together, but I can't see it - no spark.

[blue-hobbit.livejournal.com]

Well that just shows the awesomeness of your writing... not only did you capture those two perfectly without seeing that spark yourself, but you got me so interested in those two that they are more fascinating to me than any other Saiyuki pairing now.

Oh, and you don't mind if I rec your story to a friend of mine (then one who replied to one of your comments in my journal with that Gojyo icon)... she's never read Hakkai/Sanzo and now I made her curious :)

One last thing I wanted to ask you. You're using all these lovely Saiyuki icons, and I was wondering if you would be ok with sharing any of them? (with credit to you of course) But if they're more of a really personal thing for you I understand of course... just couldn't help asking ^_^

[chomiji]

Well, that's why it was such an unhappy experience, though!

I should probably just do a big icon post, but here are the ones I can access right now - the only one I still feel really possessive of is my "We walk the same line" Gojyo/Hakkai one, but I don't seem to have uploaded all of them to Earthlink. I'll have to poke around at work and see if I backed them up. (And there may be one or two here that I never used myself, as well.) Oh - and the "Hot Kappa" one is potentially a trademark violation - it's a parody of the logo for the "Hot Topic" boutique, where I buy rock star and Corpse Bride T-shirts for my daughter ... .

Wow, I only have one of my Hakkai icons there! Sorry ... .

Also, a couple of the ones I have are from meganbmoore.

And go ahead and rec the stories - you can even "out" the connection betwen the two accounts, but try not to link one to the other (I mean, don't say "chomiji" but link to "opalmatrix) ... I'm just trying to cut down on the chances of someone connecting one to the other by searching. Some of my relatives and a lot of my work colleagues would be so shocked ... .

[blue-hobbit.livejournal.com]

Yay, thank you so much for sharing! I'm definitely gonna snag a couple of these :)

[chomiji]

Check out the icon post I did recently, too - that has some of the ones I couldn't find when I did this little post for you.

(So when's your term over? There have been a couple of good new fics posted recently, but I don't want to tempt you if you're busy in RL!)