BATS

I'm watching a pr0 nature film at the moment... It's about a colony of bats that are all born in one cave in New Mexico... It's the biggest bat colony in the world when all the mothers give birth... They all fly back there in a massive cloud after getting pregnant, then give birth to one baby each (The males are elsewhere). Then the mothers fly out and harvest a cloud of 250 million moths migrating to their summer feeding grounds... All perfectly synchronised each year... And there's a colony of hawks surviving by feeding on the annual influx of bats! And one of snakes doing the same, and the floor of the cave is infested with larvae that have their hatching triggered by the bat urine, and eat fallen babies... stripping them to bare bones in 45 minutes... And humans can't enter the cave without gas masks because the gas given off by the guano is so concentrated it's deadly... Ditto predators like racoons - they die within an hour!

When the babies are ready, the whole colony of 14 million bats leaves in one huge black cloud, 5000 per second... They fly up and up into a tornado shape, until they're all flying in a towering black swarm... then they fly off in a long line back towards the breeding colonies, looking like a bee swarm right across the sky... And no jet planes can fly in that area because the bats get sucked into the engines... No flights from the local airport all that day...

I love "Sign Zone"... It's like TV, distilled - they only show decent, interesting programs (obviously with a translator at the side - mostly a big bald bloke with a goatee)... Plus it's on when I'm up blogging... Improving my mind, my composition and my typing all at the same time!

Something Ironic: Hurricanes are named with a letter from the alphabet in order through the year, and given a first name starting with that letter. The hurricane that is currently advancing across the Caribbean, and looks set to move on from Cuba into the US, is called Ivan...

[Edit - For the benefit of Podge, Ivan was a nickname for the Russians during the Cold War - Cuba was the Communist base in the Carribean...

B.T.W. Go here for a round up of our medals at the olympics, if you, like me, were left wondering where the hell half of them came from!]