Millions of Mexican free-tailed bats swirl in an ever-rising vortex before me. Their wing-beats sound less like flapping and more like the steady thrum of rain on rooftops. Beyond spectacular, the moment feels celebratory. I sit in awe. The emergence, from the mouth of a cave deep within a sinkhole, will take more than three hours.

This is the largest bat colony in the world. The two-chambered cave sits within a preserve on the northeastern edge of San Antonio, less than thirty minutes from my house. Bat mothers migrate from Mexico every March to have their babies here, one pup per female, and they stay until October. Bracken is a maternal colony. The males form bachelor colonies, like the one at Devil's Sinkhole in Rocksprings, Texas.

Soon whispers of an approaching thunderhead float across the small gathering. There is an energy in the air tonight that holds me in the moment, dreamlike. By the time I leave, flashes of lightening illuminate the purple-black sky. I roll down the window to hear the rumble of thunder. Everything is unusually still or maybe I sense the absence of fluttering bat wings, something I never knew before.

This morning a flutter caught my eye. On the driveway, I found an enormous polyphemus moth, one of the largest silk moths. I called to my son to join me. He is obsessed with Greek mythology and this gorgeous creature was named for a giant cyclops. The two owl-like eye spots on the hind wings scare away predators, I'm sure.

As I gently lifted the moth, its wings covered the span of my cupped hands. I moved it out of the driveway into the leaf litter nearby. Lost in the fallen leaves, we marveled at its ability to camouflage itself.

Not too long ago, I visited a place for the first time, and it felt like I had been there before. I had to figure out what was waiting to be learned from Enchanted Rock. Last week I had an entirely different experience: I visited a place that I immediately knew I would return to over and over again.

Indescribable secrets lay hidden in the landscape, and I couldn't  wait to start my own exploration. For almost three years, I have been obsessed with rocks, more specifically, with cracks and crevices and holes and all of the plants and animals that call those places home. At Westcave and Hamilton Pool, two places located a mile apart near South Austin, the terrain couldn't be more intriguing for someone like me, so full of layers. Layers of rocks and layers of plants lead to hiding places galore and endless possibilities for discovery.

It was a summer of amazing places and beautiful sights, close to home and far away. In Texas, my yard, mini-river, and pollinator garden were filled with life: mating monarchs and Gulf fritillaries, a diversity of caterpillars, a fawn, frog eggs, several nests, and damselfly and dragonfly eggs.

In Maine, I joined the Landscape of Change project as a citizen scientist. Several organizations are working with the community to compare changes in plant and animal populations over time on Mount Desert Island. For comparison, they are using old field logs kept by the the Champlain Society, a group of young men and women who spent their summers on MDI. I have noticed a change in the intertidal zone at our family cabin, and so I am curious to examine the results of this project, as well.

The fungi, lichen, and mosses captured my heart this year. It had been a wet spring and the woods seemed to be filled with these organisms at every turn. Using iNaturalist, I was able to learn about many new species.

After finding a dragonfly laying eggs in our mini-river a few weeks ago, I set out to see if the nymphs had hatched. I was greeted by the plunking sound of Rio Grande Leopard Frogs leaping off the rocks and into the water. And then, floating in the deepest pool, I discovered a mass of frog eggs. Nearby, delicate damselflies, called Kiowa dancers, landed on warm, exposed rocks and snails scraped layers of algae from submerged rocks. It was a busy morning, and I felt elated that our newest habitat was teeming with life.