No, not smoke but a column of bats. Bats kept surging out, and soon four columns stretched miles across the sky. A few strays looped and fed near us, passing like shuttles through the weave of the trees. The night was noticeably free of insects, but that was no surprise. These bats would eat five thousand pounds of insects that one night alone.
Nothing looks more contented than a resting alligator.
The mouth falls naturally into a crumpled smile, the eyes half close in a sleepy sort of way . . . Whales navigate through a rich, complicated landscape at a stately pace, slow as zeppelins, majestic and alert. The ocean transmits sound in strange and unlikely ways. There is a layer of water, known as the deep sound channel, in which sound waves can be trapped and spread great distances because they bend back into the channel over and over, without losing much energy. Under those circumstances, whale sound can travel as much as five hundred miles before blending into background noise.