Exploring Yuma's Critter-filled Deserts

I peered deep into a dark abandoned gold mine shaft for my first glimpse of the evening's entertainment. California leaf-nosed bats-up to 3,000 of them to be precise-would barrel out at nightfall like, well, bats out of a belfry. At last, I spotted two shadowy figures fluttering inside. I tried to reassure myself that they looked like birds (while scary images of flying rats and vampires raced through my mind). Looking over my shoulder, bat expert Dave Dalton quelled my nerves. “They're such gentle little animals,” he said with affection for these odd critters with large rabbitlike ears and leaflike projections on their noses. Dalton, a design engineer and bat researcher, has spent numerous sleepless nights during the last 25 years trekking through pitch-black Arizona deserts to stalk the tiny creatures and find out more about their mysterious habits. Tonight he was hosting a bat watch, one of dozens of field trips during the five-day Yuma Birding & Nature Festival held in April.

The popular event draws more than 500 birding and nature enthusiasts from around the country and offers excursions into Yuma's surrounding deserts and lush riparian areas, including the Imperial and Kofa national wildlife refuges and Mittry Lake Wildlife Area, often with wildlife biologists as knowledgeable guides. Amid Imperial's vast wetlands that border the lower Colorado River, lucky birders can catch a rare glimpse of the Yuma clapper rail, an endangered marsh bird. The 25,768-acre refuge is also home to great egrets and muskrats. Elusive desert bighorn sheep can often be spotted on the rugged mountains at Kofa, home to Arizona's only native palm, the California fan palm. The event also features some of nature's oddities: vast sand dunes, painted deserts, fossils and those funny-looking California leaf-nosed bats. As about 25 of us waited for nightfall at the bat watch, seated in lawn chairs encircling the mineshaft, Dalton explained his fascination for these creatures. “Bats have a lot of mystique,” he said. “They're small and they fly at night. When they left their caves, we used to have no clues about what they were doing. Now we've developed new technology that lights up the night.” Dalton demonstrated his high-tech wizardry. Specialized infrare lighting inside the mineshaft allowed a camcorder to capture the bats' images on five video monitors. We peered at the monitors, intrigued.

The Mysteries of yuma's desert

Visitors at the April nature festival explore exotic places and watch for critters

"They look like bunnies!" a woman exclaimed. The bats' huge rabbitlike ears let them detect and locate faint sounds like cricket footsteps or caterpillars munching.

I was surprised to see that the shy, nocturnal animals wear winsome expressions you'd almost call cute, despite the tiny leaves on their noses. The bats entertained us with their uncanny ability to dangle upside down-sometimes with one foot-while grooming themselves. Dalton explained they're actually quite "fastidious" about their fur and wings.

Next he passed out "bat detectors" that pick up the high-pitched squeaks (normally inaudible to the human ear) that bats send out like radar. With hovering, helicopterlike flight, they can pluck a cricket from the ground without even having to slow down. Their large eyes provide night vision on par with or better than our best military goggles, enabling them to spot insects in faint starlight. After I learned this species ranks among the world's most amazing stealth hunters, I couldn't help but wonder how they'd react to the pack of humans outside their front door.

I didn't have long to wonder. When the sky's watercolor sunset washed away into inky blackness, the first bats fluttered out. Our bat detectors suddenly emitted clicks like Morse code. Soon, like a whirlwind, dozens of bats swirled through the air, occasionally hovering or flying near our heads, and the detectors sputtered like rapid machine-gun fire.

This crowd. Soon the bats whooshed away in search of insects perched in desert foliage. We left, too, mar-veling at the wonder of the desert's night sky and its intriguing inhabitants.

But Sara may not be the hotel's only otherworldly inhabitant. According to another tale, a police officer once thought he spotted two men scuffling through the window of the gift shop. Shiningthem with a spotlight, the men seemed to disappear. After the offi-cer peered in the window, he noticed the floor was covered with dust and there were no tracks. No one was there.

Some folks contend the hotel ranks as the most haunted spot in this river boomtown with a checkered past. But Clark insisted that After the bat thrills, an evening ghost walk the next day past Yuma's most popular "haunts" offered a few spine-tingling chills. Dressed in a long black cape and carrying a red lantern, archae-ologist/historian Tina Clark escorted 80 of us through the historic downtown, stopping at places like the Hotel Lee on Main Street. Standing in front of Yuma's oldest hotel, built in 1917, I couldn't help but think of the spooky Overlook Hotel in the thriller The Shining.

I'd read that an apparition of a young woman with long dark hair and a gray housedress reportedly roams the hallways of this Spanish Colonial revival-style hotel, still in operation. Local ghost hunter Don Swain reported he captured her giggle on tape. Swain said one morning he discovered her name, Sara, in a childish scrawl on a file folder in an office that had been locked all night.

the northwest corner of Third and Madison streets, where gallows stood during the turn of the cen-tury, holds the ghostly distinction.

There, Clark mesmerized us with tales of tormented souls, like convicted murderer Martin Ubillos. "On June 16, 1906, he was brought here from the Territorial prison by carriage," she said grimly. With a look of horror on his face, he ascended the gallows and "was hanged to church bells tolling." Ever since, local citizens have gathered here on June 16 for a glimpse of his ghost. I shivered, and felt glad I was here in April.

Soon the evening's darkness felt menacing. I tried to ignore dark alleyways and the eerie glow of streetlights as we walked to the newly renovated Historic Yuma Theater, which was built in 1912 and once housed vaudeville acts. It sounded harmless enough until Clark told the tale of the Main Street Tonight group.

The group's owner recalled being alone there five years ago and hearing the sound of a trumpet player, but when she went to the stage, no one was there. The owner's husband told of discovering the seats rearranged in the theater in the morning-even after he'd secured the building so no one could enter at night. "It's the most haunted theater in Arizona," Clark told us. The evening was enough to make a hardened skeptic like me downright superstitious. For the next day's event, I gladly opted for the natural instead of the supernatural.

During an evening field trip exploring the Algodones Dunes' exotic ecology, I stood awestruck before the vast sea of sand, feeling like a Bedouin in the desert. Sand grains bouncing and rolling up the dunes' windward surfaces had created undulating crests and wind ripples casting violet shadows in a golden sea of silica. Our guide, Randy Babb, a biologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department, warned us not to be fooled by this eerily beautiful, otherworldly landscape that's been a backdrop for Star Wars scenes and looks about as inhospitable as the surface of the moon. "It's very deceiving because the place is literally crawling with life," Babb said.

"You just have to know how to look for it." "Follow me," he said, leading us over the drifting sand, which stretches for more than 40 miles from north of Glamis in Imperial County, California, to the southeastern corner of California and into Sonora, Mexico. In the United States, the Algodones Dunes rank second in size only to White Sands, New Mexico.

"This is like a blank sheet of paper that's erased by the wind every morning," he said, trudging through the soft sand. "All you have to do is to take the time to read that language, and you'll find some fascinating stories."

Just then Babb spotted wavy tracks, no doubt from one of the dunes' exotic creatures, which include Sonoran Desert fringe-toed lizards, brightly colored Colorado Desert shovel-nosed snakes, Western banded geckos and giant hairy scorpions. The tracks disappeared beneath a white bursage shrub, which Babb lifted up just in time to spot the critter's tail before it disappeared into the sand.

"There he is!" Babb said excitedly, scooping up a shovel-nosed snake. The 6-inch serpent with coral red, yellow and black bands wriggled in the palm of his hand. "It moves through the sand like a shark in the ocean," he told the group gathered around for a closer view of the coral snake look-alike. "It comes up to the surface to hunt."

As night fell, we trudged onward, using gas lanterns and flash-lights to guide our way beneath a brilliantly starlit sky. Nightfall provides the prime time to spot Western banded geckos hidden under the branches of dune creosotes or desert willows and sidewinders slithering sideways in search for prey. "One night we saw a sidewinder kill and eat a desert iguana," Babb said. "Another night we stopped counting at 150 scorpions." It seems each night holds a different adventure in this ever-changing sea of drifting sand.

For my final field trip, I spent a morning exploring Sears Point, an archaeological treasure trove with thousands of petroglyphs, rock alignments, intaglios and sleeping circles left behind by ancient cultures-Desert Archaic, Patayan and Hohokam-that dwelled here so long ago it nearly boggles the mind: between 10,000 B.C. to approximately A.D. 1450. I clambered over steep basaltic cliffs covered with deep brown patina (a sort of hard film that coats rock over time), a perfect canvas for ancient artists to peck or scratch their abstract images.

Puzzled, I stood before a cliff that looked like a collage of serpents, suns, humans and animals. Field trip guide Tina Clark advised us to use our imaginations to decipher the mysterious rock art, which was used to keep traditions alive and tell stories from one generation to the next before written language. To me, the rock art seemed to tell the story of man and his intimate connection to the land and animals. It's a message so easily forgotten, despite reminders like these left behind from the ancient ones.

The field trip was the perfect ending to an event celebrating Yuma, a remarkable crossroads that links Arizona to California and Mexico. So often I feel drawn to Yuma's history, peppered by tales of the Jesuit missionary, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, and the expeditions of explorer Juan Bautista de Anza, the Mormon Battalion and the California Gold Rush.

All other times, I feel beckoned by the stark and rugged beauty of the nearby Kofa Mountains or the Colorado River's great flyway that attracts more than 380 species of migratory birds. In fact, I'm a lot like those birds. I keep returning to the Yuma Birding & Nature Festival year after year.