Bat Wings and Coyote Tales

by David A. Ek

Nowhere else on our expansive earth do humanity, bats, and coyote pathways so fully intersect and intertwine as they do within the Chihuahuan Desert—the world’s largest and most diverse hot desert ecosystem. The place where earth, sky, time, and legend merge. It’s the perfect place to delve into the nature of humanity by enjoying the simple pleasure of observing coyotes. Yes, I said, coyote. Not just the trickster and skin-walking coyote of legend, but also the antics of the graceful, elegant, and cunning Canis latrans—the common coyote ubiquitous throughout the Chihuahuan Desert, including Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

I never understood people’s disdain for the lovely coyote. The coyote symbolizes life in what otherwise first appears as barren landscapes. If a person looks closely, life springs forth as if from nowhere—one only needs to take the time to enjoy the full experience. Look for fleet movement, sense subtle arid land smells, and listen for timeless songs. Although I’m well into middle age, my pulse still quickens as it did when I was a boy upon hearing such haunting canine conversations.

I associate the coyote with deserts and scrublands, but they have been my heartwarming companions within shared landscapes from coast to coast—treed, rocked, splashed, or splayed. Among nature’s most noble creatures, Canis latrans has tenacity and is a survivor. I only wish I were as resilient.

My first coyote experiences were in the scrublands of eastern Washington. Every night I heard them immediately outside my tiny trailer. I often slunk off to catch a glimpse. No matter how sly or quiet my attempt was, they noticed me coming every time. This game continued unabated for the entire summer. We were never close or familiar enough to be friends, but never too distant to remain strangers. Trickster Coyote played with me that summer. By autumn, they had won every hand and won every game. I could see how Northwest American tribes appreciated their cunning and prowess—after all, Coyote created the Columbia River and brought fire to people. Perhaps coyotes only showed themselves to the worthy. Wasn’t I worthy?

By happenstance, as a young man full of ambition and full of wonderment, I fell into a joyous job opportunity while working at New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park, deep in what is now a fracking Mecca. The path began with bats, but eventually led to coyotes—doesn’t all life’s wonderous opportunities have the same trajectory?

Researchers wrote a computer program that worked with a videotape recorder (yes, back in the dark eighties) to estimate bat population size. Park managers wanted a better count for the famous Carlsbad Caverns bat colony. The experimental program attempted to count bats during their daily twilight exodus from their maternity roosts located deeper in the cave.

For the program and primitive eighties apparatus to work, the system required at least one flawless videotape recording of an evening’s streaming bat flight. Not too dark, with no clouds, no horizon, and framed against an open and lingering azure sky. The program required bats to fly straight and true. Bats have been on earth longer than you, me, or any computer program. They had little reason or desire to conform to programmed expectations or scripted parameters—especially by the likes of me or computer programmers. It’s the nature of bats to fly erratically. The only straightness I observed that summer was the path leading from the bat count to the American coyote.

I filmed every night for the entire summer seeking the perfect bat video. Although watching Carlsbad Caverns’ evening bat flight is a world-renowned experience, little did I know that the most enriching encounter came from another night-time species that also sought its own unique bat experience.

The ranger-led “bat flight talks” were immensely popular with the visiting public. Benches at the cave’s natural entrance seated eight hundred people, but often well over one thousand crowded together every evening for the bat experience of a lifetime. They gathered at dusk to watch, enthralled, as a million Chiropteran suddenly burst from the cave. The bat cloud swirled to gain the elevation needed to clear the encircling limestone-studded cave opening.

Spectators have described this thick swirling mass of fluttering and circling bats as a cloud—even a tornado. However, despite the cloud containing thousands upon thousands of bats, it still took two hours for a million bats to pass the cave’s constricting throat. While visitors watched the spectacle, they also listened to the ranger tell bat stories and share bat information. People came from all over the world to have this unusual wildlife experience.

Park visitors were not the only ones enthralled and raptured by bat cloud spectacles. From my bat filming perch, I discovered coyotes also came from far away to watch bats—well, at least one resolute, inquisitive, and captivating coyote. All park visitor’s heads and eyes strained to look up, but right under their unaware noses was the coyote standing with them shoulder-to-shoulder. Both visitors and coyote came together because of a shared interest in bats. Visitors wanted a visual wildlife experience. While the coyote sought a meal.

A bat would make a decent coyote meal. But canines are ill-suited to leaping quickly or high enough to catch a flying and fluttering bat streaming out of the cavernous maw. I was not the only one who hoped the bats flew straight and true. However, coyotes are smart, adaptable, and opportunistic. This individual coyote discovered that not all bats could safely navigate the flight from the cave’s entrance. It’s a steep angle for such a small and frail-winged creature. After exiting the cave, bats needed to quickly gain elevation to clear the cactus-festooned limestone rim rock circling the cave’s entrance. Not every bat made it. Every evening, a few bats crashed into the rocks—or more often, flew into cactus spines. Those that hit the cave wall quickly shook themselves off, and like a sacked quarterback, quickly charged back into the game. The poor bats skewered onto prickly pear cactus spines didn’t fare nearly as well. Impaled bats couldn’t just shake themselves off and rejoin the game—the poor creatures remained stuck on cactus spines—futility fluttering trying to break free from their imprisonment.

Fortunately, cactus-impaled bats didn’t suffer long. After each impaling, the coyote silently dispatched itself and carefully extracted the bat from its entanglements. Once free from the spines, the coyote gleefully gulped the fluttering morsel into her anxiously awaiting gullet. Immediately upon consuming each bat in such a manner, she silently darted back to her observation post to wait for the next fluttering impalement. Experience taught the coyote which prickly pear caught the most bats.

To keep an eye on all the best bat-capturing cacti, the coyote took advantage of the best vantage point. An ideal spot where she could keep an eye on bats but remain concealed from other bat flight spectators. Apparently, the best watch-post was only twelve feet from a bat-watching bench. The coyote must have discovered that people sitting on benches always look up to the bats, and rarely, if ever, look nose-high over their right shoulder.

Centered among this perfect coyote watch-post was a thick cholla, greasewood, and prickly pear patch. The brush clump reached higher than the coyote’s head. Consequently, watching bats from this protective cover required a higher vantage point than its legs offered the resourceful coyote. She overcame this height disadvantage by momentarily rising on her hind feet—just enough to poke coyote eyes above the cholla, greasewood, and prickly pear shrubbery crest.

Either to keep from being exposed too long or because remaining standing on her hind feet was too much of a strain, the coyote kept either slowly poking her head above the clump or slowly descending. The coyote’s antics reminded me of a submarine in stealth mode that strategically raised and lowered its periscope to remain undetected by patrolling surface boats. For the coyote in balanced extended mode, after her head cleared the greasewood, she slowly and methodically rotated her head scanning the surrounding cacti for bat impalements. Upon observing an impaled fluttering morsel, the coyote, with faster than rabbit speed, came down on all four feet and dashed off to quickly de-entangle the bat, slurped it up, and then just as quickly disappeared back into the brush clump. Moments later, her head once again slowly rose above the brush level so that she could continue scanning for more morsels.

All this head-raising and scanning occurred within twelve feet of unsuspecting and unaware park visitors whose eyes remained fixed upon and perfectly matched the undulating bat pulses of the non-impaled bats as they successfully rose, swirled, and drifted into the Chihuahuan Desert’s dark night sky.

Every night was a repeat—same bat place, same bat time, and same bat channel. It had to be the same coyote. Each impalement required slightly different coyote antics to successfully bat-extract while remaining invisible to the bat-enthralled crowd. She learned new bat-hunting and people-watching techniques every evening. The visitors didn’t notice the coyote and the coyote gave no sign of noticing me. The one consistency was that everyone noticed the bats. Although I love bats, and so did the people who came from all over the world to watch Carlsbad Caverns’ bat flight spectacle, I found watching this coyote’s antics more captivating—and that’s saying a lot.

Despite filming every evening that summer, I never obtained the perfect bat film. Problems with each tape prevented the program and apparatus from producing a reliable bat count. However, even if it had worked, it would have only provided a number—a statistic. Bat tapes, even perfect ones, eventually fade with time and succumb to the wastebasket of technological advances. Tapes may give way to compact discs and these in turn succumb to streaming and other modern-day devices, but bat and coyote experiences endure.

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Seeing up close has always been a challenge, but it’s the broad view that is even more daunting. It’s human nature. Especially when attention is narrowly focused. We are not as good at multi-tasking as we like to think. When immersed in our finances, we may be blinded to the financial health of others. When we focus hard on getting ahead in a race, any race, we may lose sight of those who fell behind. It is human nature to have compassion for the ones we love and for members of our specific community. However, people’s sense and scope of community vary widely, based on their worldview and cultural upbringing.

The bats were oblivious to the cactus spines. The people were oblivious to the coyote. The coyote was oblivious to me watching her…and I was oblivious to…I don’t know what—since that is what oblivious means, and I’m likely still oblivious. That is the nature of obliviousness.

We all have selective vision, selective awareness, and selective worldviews. Even people with 20/20 vision cannot discern changes that happen much too slowly for those with a limited attention span. It is this inability to perceive long-term and non-personal views that makes us most vulnerable. We humans are not wired for such expansive and communal sight. Given that, it’s amazing that cross-cultural diplomacy can work—even sometimes. However, if Carlsbad’s bat wings and coyote tails are any indication, we are not alone. Perhaps what people share above all else with our diverse interspecies brethren is a collective, communal, and universal obliviousness.

Non-human animals may lack expansive verbal language. They make up for it by being highly attuned to non-verbal signs—especially emotional. Animal communicator Danielle McKinnon once postulated that animals are so attuned to human emotions that they absorb and take those emotions into themselves. Empathy at its finest. Other researchers refer to the spread of emotions between animals and people as “emotional contagion.” If so, had this contagion gone the other way in the case of the bat flight coyote?

Had coyote learned her obliviousness from humans? Or was the coyote up to its old trickster ways? Was coyote playing with me and I was too oblivious to recognize it? Regardless, Canis latrans is proof enough that there is so much more to both coyotes and the human condition than what first appears. In this way, we share many traits with the Chihuahuan Desert and arid scrubland living systems—if we only look closer and momentarily shed our obliviousness and enjoy the full experience.

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© Copyright 2025 David Alan Ek. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. This story is nonfiction. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time.

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Through TAR, we travel and experience the diverse Americana landscape. In our last post we joined a modern-day Walter Mitty on his futile search for water along America’s highways, byways, and ever-shrinking watering holes. In TAR’s next post, come with us as we philosophize if a city can die—or be killed. Look for “When Death Doth Close Cairo’s Tender Eyes” on March 1.

In the meantime, please check out my website’s Portfolio page for a description of my compelling novels, Pedro’s Pickles and the American Dream and Lizard People: Death Valley Underground, and my relatable literary nonfiction book Nowhere Bound—A Spud’s Reflections on Climbing, Caving, and Other Useless Toils. I encourage you to like or follow my Facebook and Goodreads “Author’s Pages.” Until then, take care and I look forward to our next glimpse into Americana on our next TAR adventure. See you then.