St. Kitts: Day Two

We met up with Amanda and drove around looking at houses that have bats in the rafters and such, and picked a spot for the first capture day with lots of potential for bats. Then we went hiking! There is a cave at the top of a ravine that is referred to by everyone as the bat cave, due to the many many bats that live there. The hike was my first venture into rainforest, and it was a beautiful way to do it. I met my first strangler figs, and did my first rock climbing that involved something less than vertical - it was only a few feet of it and there was a rope but still - a bit on the intimidating side. We eventually got to the cave and there were over a thousand bats there, flying around, generally not happy with our presence. It was deemed a definite spot for later when the students were more experienced. I managed to give myself some nasty heat exhaustion, though I really tried to not. Apparently my hard-won skill at sensing the danger signs doesn't work in high humidity.The evening's bat hunt involved first time net-setting and shortly after the first two nets were up we caught a bird, which everyone enjoyed looking at briefly. It was a good thing we caught a bird because then we caught nothing else. It was a very windy night an apparently bats don't like flying through smallish spaces when wind can toss them about. Go figure. Time to go home and crash and sleep off the remnants of heat exhaustion.