Our Little Brown Bats

For the last several years, we've had bats, the common 'little brown bat', roosting on the underside of the deck stairs. Perhaps they are hunting or scouting parties; they don't form a permanent colony, but visit us (and eat lots of bugs and insects) for a couple of weeks each spring. Their numbers may vary between one and a dozen from day to day.

I took a bunch of photographs of the ball-o-bats that formed in the corner of the stair. The entire clump is only 3 inches across. Trying several settings -- macro, regular, macro-zoom, 'intelligent assist', high sensitivity -- two came out that were useable. Intelligent assist mode turned on the flash that I had turned off, but fortunately it didn't disturb our friends, possibly because it was noon and the world outside their nook was already bright. Here's the flash photo. This is looking up at the underside of the top step.

Here they are in natural light. I had to raise the camera's maximum exposure time higher than its default of 1/8 second.

I thanked them for their pictures, promised not to disturb their slumber again, and tiptoed away. Happy hunting, guys!