THAILAND | Khao Yai Bat Cave — Flight of a Million Bats

I glanced at the clock on the car’s digital display screen. It was 5:15 p.m. Navigating along a bumpy, dirt road, I rolled past the Wat Tham Sila Thong temple tucked away at the foothills of towering limestone cliffs in the Pak Chong district of Thailand. Someone on TripAdvisor cited the temple as a good viewing point. Another person provided a set of coordinates that led further down the road from the temple. Google Maps, on the other hand, drops its location pin on a different spot named “Bat Viewing Road”, but it was claimed to be erroneous by yet another TripAdvisor contributor.

With information so scant and varied, it wasn’t clear to me the best place to view the bats from. I guess you could say I was going in blind. Like a bat actually, as the saying goes. Funny.

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The Khao Luk Chong bat cave is located six kilometres outside of Khao Yai National Park, UNESCO World Heritage site and third largest national park in Thailand. Years of erosion has resulted in the dissolution of the limestone cliff outcrops into karst topography, marked by tunnels and caves that are ideal for bats to roost in. By day, the nocturnal bats shut their eyes and sleep. By sundown, they arise from their upside-down slumber and set off to hunt and feast on the plentiful insects borne of the agricultural fields that blanket the Thai countryside.

I decided to drive past all the possible viewing spots and choose where to stop as I go along. From the temple, the dirt road meandered on without a good place to stop the car so I pulled into a clearing at the end of the road instead (GPS coordinates: 14.549254, 101.545786), which was nearer Google Map’s “Bat Viewing Road” pin.

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A lone tree stood quietly by the side while farmhouses watched on from a distance. There were no other vehicles around, and I wondered if I was at the wrong location. Wouldn’t it be tragic if all the action was on another side of the limestone cliffs, out of my sight?

I lifted my left wrist and checked my watch. 5:30 p.m., it read. The sun was setting above the tree line, a glowing ball of fiery ember behind the thin veil of a cloudy sky. Three big dogs lumbered towards me, sniffing around my legs for a bit before running off into the fields for a gambol. Across the green, I could see two trucks pull up by a narrow road while tourists jumped off the back and scattered around. Some busied with their tripods and cameras while others raised their binoculars to the skies. They even had local guides with them, who by all accounts should know the best spot to view the bats from.

And yet I was here instead. A solitary tourist beneath a solitary tree, without a guide nor any inkling if she was at the right location. But hey, aren’t we all under the same sky, staring at the same set of limestone cliffs?

Leaning against the hood of my car, I fixed my gaze upon the craggy cliffs where the bats call home. Call it blind faith if you want, but I decided to stay right where I was, in the company of the three canines that had returned to sniff at my shoes .

As the sun disappeared behind the trees and the skies crept towards twilight, I took another look at the time. 5:45p.m. Anytime now, I said to myself. The colony of bats were to emerge from their cave near the evening hour of six. I didn’t know if they would appear like clockwork as they were said to, but patiently I waited. It wasn’t at all lost on me that waiting for a million bats to fly overhead did seem like an awfully odd thing to do, though. I mean, bats, furry as they may be, aren’t exactly adorable creatures. Some have also been known to bring about diseases like rabies. And what about the guano, or bat droppings, that these creatures of the night may grace the top of my head with?

Then, at 5:56 p.m, the bats began their exodus from the Khao Luk Chang bat cave.

At first, they were just a few tiny black specks fluttering off into the waning light. Then more appeared, and suddenly it was a pulsating river of bats.

As they streamed out of the cave, they marched together in a single band, rising and falling in unison like a tidal wave as they rippled across the sky in search of dinner.

Now, you’d think that being as blind as bats are said to be, they might have trouble avoiding crashing into one another. But, contrary to popular belief, bats aren’t really blind. The myth may have come about because they are nocturnal mammals and hunt at night, but while they do rely on echolocation — emitting sound waves and using the echoes that bounce back to determine the location of objects — to pinpoint where their prey are, bats can actually see perfectly well.

Better than humans, in fact, especially in low light conditions.

As more exited from the cave, the black cloud of bats grew thicker and the flapping sound of their wings grew louder.

I stood by my car and gazed up in amazement: how many is one million? Too many to count, that’s for sure. The bats swooped low as they passed directly over head, and it was one of the strangest sights I’ve ever seen. The dark ribbon of cloud came alive, contorting and distorting in a twisting manner like a snake, accompanied by a racket of hissing and chittering. Collectively, the bats morphed into a much bigger creature in the sky, a black serpent that slithered over forests and fields, farmhouses and hills.

But the “serpent” is not without enemy. The bats are as much prey as they are predators. Before they can hunt for their meal in the night, they must first avoid being hunted themselves.

Predatory birds circled around the colony of bats menacingly, waiting for the right moment to swoop in for a sudden kill. Sometimes, bats would stray from their formation and the birds would give chase, hoping to grab a bat in their beaks. It was like witnessing an aerial game of cat and mouse.

By 6:30 p.m., it was getting harder to see as night gathered and slowly consumed the skies. The colony of bats had thinned out and although you could still see some emerging into the darkened skies, the spectacle wasn’t as impressive as when they were moving in droves. Across the field, the local guides rounded their tourists back onto their trucks and left. The show was over for us.

For the bats, however, the night had only just begun.

And when day breaks, these bats will fly back into the Khao Luk Chang cave to rest after a long night’s worth of hunting and feasting. It wouldn’t be long, though, before a million bats will wake again and set off into the evening skies over Khao Yai, for our entertainment and wonderment surely, but most importantly, for the sustenance and survival of these creatures of the night.