Bat (animal)

Established as a national park: Aug. 9, 1916. Area: 106,372 acres. Visitors: 376,695 in 2001. Location: 50 miles east of Red Bluff, Calif. Flora and fauna: Shrubs, herbs, grasses and trees-mostly conifers-are taking hold in lava-flow areas. Wildlife...

Barramundi Moon, Australia I thought I might die in Dampier Land. It wasn't just the saltwater crocodiles lurking in the mangrove creeks. It wasn't the black tip sharks patrolling the waters of King Sound. I could keep a wary eye on the 30-foot tides,...

My family and I were 750 feet beneath the surface of the Earth in an isolated corner of southern New Mexico, thanks to Lou Potter, a colleague of my retired father. In the 1960s, Potter fired my dad's imagination with stories of amazing sights deep...

Placerita Canyon State Park looks a lot like Mars. The ground, buried in layers of ash from a 2,800-acre wildfire in mid-July, resembles the inside of a barbecue pit, and the vegetation is extraordinary in that there isn't much. Here and there, clustered...

The process is easy: just add water and the deserts of Southern California burst into color. During the El Niño year of 1998, for instance, a series of rainstorms transformed a 40-mile stretch of Interstate 40 between Barstow and Needles into a carpet of...

The calendar tells us that these are the first days of fall. But for wild creatures making their home in the city, the autumn shuffle is already under way. They're moving along secret highways that parallel our own: the light-rail right of way, the JFX...

Just beyond the Colorado River, up the twisting narrows of Blacktail Canyon, small gray-green bats flit a ballet at dusk. The canyon is silent, the river a distant whisper, and high overhead, above the layers of gneiss in blue and black and white...

In a town known for its bountiful buffets, the most unusual one is staged at the Luxor Hotel-Casino, where freeloaders fly in for a feeding frenzy. We're talking bats, at a bug buffet served not inside the pyramid-shaped hotel, but above it, in its...

The Midwest is known for its front-porch folksiness and down-to-earth pleasures. But take a world-view of the region, and you find that some of its attractions are as exotic and unique as anything on Earth. This, for instance, is the land of Serpent...

Established as a national park: Feb. 26, 1919. Area: 1,218,376 acres (1,904 square miles). Visitors: 4,908,073 in 1995. Location: Entirely within northwestern Arizona, 60 miles north of Williams, 80 miles north of Flagstaff. Flora and fauna: 75...

MAMMOTH CAVE NATIONAL PARK,Ky.--The world's biggest hole in the ground--at least by one way of measuring--has been dug right here. It weaves beneath high ridges covered with tulip poplars, beech groves and black oak trees, or it snakes below rolling...

Established as a national park: July 1, 1941. Area: 52,714. Visitors: 1,989,082 visitors in 1996 (480,177 cave visitations). Location: About 85 miles south of Louisville and 85 miles north of Nashville, near Interstate Highway 65. Flora and fauna:...