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Chapter 5: The Lizards: When Blowguns and Nooses Have Unusual Uses
- The University of Alabama Press
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CHAPTER 5 The Lizards: When Blowguns and Nooses Have Unusual Uses I was on my back, using my elbows to move feet-first down the sloping sand floor. I was fourth in the six-man line ofback crawlers. My headlamp was of little use, for when I stared directly upward the ceiling was fewer than six inches above my forehead. The passage was perhaps three feet in width. Narrow. Very narrow. Any normal person would have felt claustrophobic, and I felt very normal. As a herpetologist, I had no business lying on the sandy incline ofa tunnel several hundred feet inside a west Texas gypsum cave. But somehow Don Tinkle, who at that time was on the faculty of Texas Tech University, had convinced me to help him with a study that could be conducted only in this manner. "Listen," he said from the front of the line. To be sure, we did. We all stopped. I tilted my head forward to direct the light beam between my feet and over the top of three outstretched bodies further down the incline. A chill traveled up the line of bodies with the speed of spoken sound. "Listen" is the last word you want to hear in a gypsum cave. Gypsum is a stratified rock with structural properties that allow layers to slide upon one another. I had been told that ifyou're in a cave that begins to slip, you could be closed off from the outside world forever. I listened for the grinding. I was hoping to hear the high buzz of a western diamondback like the one we had caught coiled in the cave's entrance. I hoped it was just another rattlesnake, one that had crawled deep into the cool cave to escape the Texas sun. Any of us could handle a rattlesnake-but not sliding gypsum. After a few moments I tuned into a far different sound, something you would expect from a dozen little boys trying to sound like chugging locomotives-a combination of puffing and whooshing. Blowguns and Nooses Have Unusual Uses. 73 Someone murmured, "Bats," and I saw my first one of the day. It came up the tunnel with more finesse than I have ever seen in an animal. Slipping between a pair of boots, skimming over the brim of a hat, and then gliding with a gentle undulation alongside me. The bat looked into my light with tiny black eyes as it brushed by with a whispery sound. I turned my light back down the incline where the sound of a loud wind seemed to be approaching. Another lone bat fluttered up the tunnel, faster than the first one. All of our lights were fixed on the bottom of the tunnel as the roaring grew louder. Someone below me shouted as furry brown creatures began to fill the cave tunnel from the bottom. I hurriedly zipped my windbreaker up to my neck and crossed my hands over my chest. I craned forward so my light would show me the length of the tunnel. The first dozen or so whizzed over my face or beside my head. But as the numbers thickened, they began to collide with the sand, with the walls, and with us. One landed in the center of my windbreaker and began walking up in an awkward, stumbling fashion. Before it reached its takeoff point on my headlamp, it had climbed onto my chin and scrambled across my face. Five or six more landed on my dungarees or jacket and began their ascent toward the top of the tunnel. Unfortunately my face lay between them and their destination. And for no less than ten minutes hundreds of Mexican free-tail bats used my lower torso as a landing strip and my forehead as a launching pad. Only one got misdirected enough to begin walking up the inside of my pants leg. Despite the cramped quarters, my other foot swiftly and firmly pushed it out. I kept my ankles crossed from that point. The army ofwalking wings finally subsided to a few individuals that were able to maintain their flight up the tunnel without landing. We finally continued down the tunnel to a larger passageway at the bottom where we could stand and exchange impressions. By comparison, the rest of the day was as uneventful as home gardening . We put leg bands on a few hundred baby bats that were clinging to the ceiling in the nursery chamber and got back...