Yep, dusk is falling on that magical evening, so I had to post an appropriate image to help the mood along. Here, we see an extremely rare Portuguese tiny-tailed bat (Yashulden bythis) cruising overhead in pursuit of its favorite prey, Carolina wrens. Since Carolina wrens are diurnal and bats are nocturnal, now you know why they’re extremely rare.
Okay, no – there is no such species, and indeed, this isn’t even a bat. It was shot at one of my beach trips this year, spotted as I was doing the sorting and set aside for a nonsense post, and is in reality an unidentified tern. The ‘tail’ is actually the bird’s beak, while those ‘ears’ are the notched tail. You should have known right away that I was joshing you, because nothing that flies could possibly have a thin little tail like that, since a tail surface is necessary for pitching the body in flight. But it was still a cool silhouette when thought of in that way, right?
[You have to also appreciate the idea that I posted this in a timely manner, right before dusk on Halloween, as if readers are constantly refreshing the page to see what might pop up, and not discovering this post on, say, December 17th.]
Here’s another perspective, possibly the same species but very likely a different individual since the photos were shot three minutes apart.
Really, both of these photos are going to be discarded from my stock, because they serve no useful purpose, but I kept this one for a moment only because of that shine of the rising sun from the beak, about the only thing that breaks the silhouette and hints at what you’re seeing. And not very well at that.