To understand our animal kinfolk, you have to hang around with them. After the thundering seismic trucks and gronking oil rigs have driven off the rarer native species, the strong ones emerge: bats, rats, deer, tarantulas; the noble houses of the waste lands come to claim the available space. Gone are the 4-spot toads, the 13-striped ground squirrels. But nature fills the vacuum with tall hustling roaches, the rustling migrations of rats and tarantulas around Abilene, the moaning whirr of ten million bats out of Carlsbad Caverns, tucking into ten hundred million mosquitoes in a desert where all that is not roaring is gurgling and slithering.

The bats liked to come into my logging unit. I opened the door before dawn one day and a bright-eyed Mexican freetail bat was hanging off the bottom of the door, just as surprised as I was.