COMBINATION PHOTOGRAPHY CONTEST FROM @PAPA-PEPPER – WEEK 4 - Bats; a nighttime blessing

gardenbsquared (59)in #photography • 7 years ago (edited)

My second entry for this weeks "Combination Photography Contest from @papa-pepper". If you haven’t checked it out, you definitely must go there. There are many great entries.

https://steemit.com/contest/@papa-pepper/combination-photography-contest-from-papa-pepper-week-4

We have a lot of bats living in the roof of our house. You can hear them during the day sometimes, squabbling, squeaking and fighting.

Bats are very important to our ecosystem to keep the mosquito population under control. Every evening they swarm out and then there are hundreds of bats in the sky.

Sometimes the bats make it into our house but then they usually get stuck. They cannot find their way out again. I caught many of these trapped bats with my bare hands and released them outside. One time there was even one in our bed. It had crawled underneath the blanket.

Yesterday, at the beginning of the evening, I found one again. So I picked it up and took it outside.

And here is the proof that its not me taking the photographs but my wife. I cannot handle a bat and a heavy camera at the same time.

Here's a little video of a, maybe pregnant, bat in my shed. It's an older video. She doesn't look very happy to be disturbed. At the end of the video you can see them flying and hunting for mosquitos and other insects.

https://dtube.video/#!/v/gardenbsquared/35mmfqf7

A few screen shots from the video.

Bat 1.jpg

Bat 2.jpg

Maybe it's not wise to pick them up like that but these bats are easy to handle and I rescued many.

It's time to put it somewhere safe. So I put it in the shed which has a very open roof structure. He can now have a little "hang-in" before it has to go to work.