Batty @ the Townsend Wye || 10-15-08

We planned tonight to go to the Royal Blue Wildlife Management Area to see the elk. That didn't work out, so we planned to go salamander searching on the Finley Cane Trail near Cades Cove. My brother had to be dropped off at work at 5 and picked up at 8, so that was out. Hmmm... What to do?
For plan C, we made our way to Townsend without a clear goal. We stopped at the Subway (the same one that once told my mother-in-law that the toasted sandwiches had fewer calories than the untoasted sandwiches) and then bebopped on down to the National Park and set out to picnic at the Townsend Wye. Aside from ending a hike there once, I've never just hung out at the Wye. Whenever it's warm outside at all, the Wye is packed. Tonight, it was the four of us and another family of four. After dining on the riverside, we went down to the water to throw rocks in the water (it will keep us occupied for hours). Two cool science moments we played with. If you bang two pieces of quartz together it makes a spark. It's not a "start a fire" spark, but a "mobile electron" spark. Pretty cool. BTW--it needs to be dark to see it. Second moment--while crawling around on the ground looking for good picture angles, what did I see? One bat? Two bats? Oh, about a dozen bats flying around. The nice thing about where we were is that the Y, where the prongs of Little River meet, affords a large open space surrounded by trees. The open space made it possible for us to the see the bats with pretty good detail--especially the low-flying stunt bats that flew between us to show off their mad ecolocation skills. To teach the young uns about ecolocation, we were probably environmentally negligent and threw pebbles up in the air to show how the bats would swoop at them thinking they were mosquitoes. We only did this a couple of times, though, because we didn't want to be responsible for a bat eating rocks.