That’s right, folks, tonight is International Bat Night. Wanna know who told me? Kylie Ireland. That’s why I’m Twitter friends with badass old-school porn stars, you see; sometimes they’re also bat nerds.

The video above was taken maybe ten minutes from my house, at the Yolo Causeway, ‘neath which the bat hordes doth hide. If you’ve never seen these babies swarming out of their hiding places at sunset, you have missed one of the most amazing sights in the world; this video just captures the barest whisper of what it’s like to see the vast river of bats emerging from their hiding places in the hollows beneath teh Causeway.

But I am given to understand that small-town Davis shit is small potatoes when it comes to bat flights — fingerlings, even. I remember a couple of friends who road-tripped it to the caves in the Santa Guadalupe mountains, where they said the bats darkened the sky.

I couldn’t find a video of the bat flight in the Guadalupe Mountains, but here’s one taken at Carlsbad, set, pretentiously enough to “Flight of the Valkries” (I would have preferred “Bela Lugosi’s Dead“):

Remember, all you baby bats out there, if you’re bad ass-enough to go hunt down some bat flights, watch from a distance and no flash photography. It pisses them off. And the last thing you wanna do, kids, is anger the bat gods. They’ll get you while you sleep.

Speaking of which, I’ll have you know that Google has no predictive search entry for “most adorable bat pictures.” WTF? Still get some batty results:

As a former Gothic Net columnist, I am professionally qualified and required by durable contractual obligation to inform you that no matter how many girls she’s kissed, Katy Perry is only posing as a baby bat in the above picture. She’s such a conformist.

These bats, however, are real: