The sight of hundreds of thousands of bats streaming from their roost at dusk is one of nature’s great spectacles. Swarms can be so dense they resemble rising smoke at a distance. But the aerial antics of the birds of prey that hunt them are just as astonishing.
Studying these behaviours in a remote corner of the Chihuahuan Desert (which stretches from the southwest US to Mexico) has been a highlight of my almost 25-year career as a biologist studying animal flight. My team’s study was done in collaboration with bat scientist Laura Kloepper (University of New Hampshire).
