Gators and Bats and Deer--Oh My!

Nov. 23, 2012

I wanted to show Zach and Des the bats coming out of their houses on campus because we didn't get a chance to do it the last time she visited. Zach had also never seen it in all the time he lived here.

We got there a little before sundown and walked across the street to Lake Alice to look for gators. I was kind of hoping we'd only see them from afar because they scare the stuffing out of me. There was one about 20 feet out in the lake when we hit that side of the street and it was interested in us. When it closed half the distance I started walking away and tried to get Zach and Des to come with me, but they were much more daring. I'm glad it was a little chilly that evening because the gator didn't leave the water, but it did go right up to the edge. After a few minutes of watching (thankfully from a distance up the bank), Zach and Des continued on to the little walkway that juts out over a part of the lake.

There were a few more gators nearby but none got dangerously close. The biggest looked to be about ten feet long. He's in the background in this shot:

They both loved watching the gators and I couldn't get them to go back across the street to the bat houses. It was a needless worry--the bats found us! It turns out that at the lake is a much better place to watch the bats swoop out since they immediately head there and start flying around it.

At some point in the future I may come back to this entry and try again to upload a short video of the bats, but as of tonight, it's choking on it. Oh well.

There's not much time between the bats first emerging and full dark, so we didn't stay much longer. On the way home we espied a group of 5 or 6 deer walking through the neighborhood which put a nice cap on our Floridian wildlife evening.