We went to Wind Cave at Bau (about 45 km from Kuching City), during this Gawai holiday.  First, let me show you the special friends we have met in the cave.  They are a big group of little flying mammals - the bats.  Each of them are tiny in size.  They are even smaller then our palm’s size.

They like to hang themselves on the ceilings and walls inside the cave.

From different angle, they look differently.  This bat looks cute in round shape.  In this picture, I can also see that the bat was using its claws to hold itself on the ceiling.

They have a pair of ears each, which can be turned in any direction without moving their head, first I mistakenly thought that those are their eyes.  They emit ultra sound and listen to the echo in order to know directions and what their surroundings like.  That is why they can fly inside that cave which is almost completely dark even during day time.

It took us quite a long time to take the photos of these bats.  First it was completely dark in the cave, and my camera was unable to focus on the bats, I had to use manual focusing, while SiewPeng was holding the torch light pointing at the bat so that I could tell where to point my camera to.  If I took too long to focus, the bat would fly away, and I had to target on another bat and redo the focusing.

Since it was dark, I had to use my camera’s built in flash light.  But it was still underexposed if the bat was too high on the ceiling.  Therefore I had to increase the ISO setting which was also increasing the noise of these photos.  Next time, I will get a brighter torch light which allow my camera to do auto-focus and hopefully I can have an external flash light which allow me to use lower ISO.

Compare the photo above and below.  They are the same bat, but its ears moved a bit.  From this angle, its ears look like its eyes, and actually they function like our eyes and more efficient than our eyes, because the bats do not have to use torch lights in the cave.

This is the only sharp photo that I have while the bat’s wings were wide opened.  I tried to take a lot of photos while they were flying but most of them were out of focus and blur.

Each of them has a parking space in the cave.

Bat has good hearing but poor eye sight.  I guess they noticed us when we were moving instead of when we were pointing the torch at them.

Next, I am going to show you how the cave looks like.  To be continued…