my turn at bat

It is 9 PM.


Or it was when I started writing this blog.


It is my time of day. The "busyness" that intrudes even into retirement winds down. The sunset offers the promise of respite from the summer heat.


Each evening I sit on the balcony of my little house on the playa watching the two parts of the day slide into one another. Neither night nor day.


And for a few minutes, I can watch nature's shift workers trade off their duties.


We have swallows -- or golondrina, as they are called in Spanish.


When I was here last year, the joists of the patio were honeycombed with barn swallow nests. O'Hare had fewer daily flights than the touch and gos of the patio swallows. Tippy Hedren would have felt right at home.


And you can imagine what the patio floor and furniture looked liked. Rocks in the Galapagos have more bare spots. Nitrate mining was a definite economic opportunity.


Not this year. Marta went to war with the swallows. They would build nests. She would conduct her own form of carpet bombing with hose and stick.


Marta and the swallows eventually came to an accommodation. Five or six swallows showed the tenaciousness of the Taliban.


Each evening the remnant swallows hunt almost like dolphins. They fly through the edges of the palm trees stirring up insects, who are then picked off by the other swallows.


But the gregaious day shift swallows are soon replaced by a solitary bat, who swoops around the margin of the same palm trees.


One of our blogging colleagues is a big bat fan, and quite the enemy of swallows.

Now that we have come to an accommodation with the swallows (an accommodation that Felipe would most likely equate with Munich), I have learned to appreciate watching their flight antics, their nesting habits, and their peculiar song.


And there is a lesson here. I have formed an emotional attachment to the swallows because I have come to know them. Their guano is still an issue. But it is outweighed by everything else.


The bat, on the other hand, is a cipher. I see it only briefly.


I have no idea what type of bat it is -- or where it spends its days. I do know that it roosts over the outdoor bar sink in the early evening. At first, I thought we had a family of mice sufficient to outfit Cinderella's coach. But it is just the solitary bat.


So, each evening, I will watch for the erratic flight of the bat. In hopes that I can learn just a little more about it.


And, with a little more familiarity, I just may come to think of it as a swallow of the night.