Is That You?!?

Greetings to all!  It's me, Mags.  The other morning after our walk, Cam and I went out on the upper deck with Mom before it got too hot to be out there.  I was walking around, checking everything out when ...

"Hey ... what's this?!?  I smell something on the underside of the deck!  I ... I hear something!"

It was really odd ... but I did have a vague idea of what it was!  I decided I should call for backup, just in case there was trouble, like they do in the really cool detective shows I like to watch.

"I need to call in the big guns!"

Fortunately for me, Cam was right there, and was ready to investigate!

"Is it what I think it is, Cam?!?"
"Yes.  Yes, I think it is!  Hey!  Hey, you down there!!!"

Can you guess what -- or should I say who -- it was?!?  Long-time readers of the Ao4 Digest will probably get this one -- it was Bart!

Our great-brothers and great-sisters first posted about him in 2007.  Bart is a little Brown Bat who lives under our upper deck!  We can see him from the lower deck, but Mom hasn't gotten a decent shot of him yet this year.  (Please click here to see a shot from a couple of years ago.)

Mom always is very careful to wash all the guano off the lower deck before we go down there, so we've never really gotten a good smell of him before -- but we did now!  This calls for one thing, and one thing alone!  A round of Crazed River Otter Games!

"BOOM!"
"Oh, no!  It's a crazed rive--UMPH!!!!"

Cam was a little quicker on the draw than I was, but I jumped right in!

"Gotcha, you little crazed river ott---"
"BOOM!"

What fun!  Who'd think you could have a bat AND crazed river otters on the same deck - right?

Mom is always happy to see Bart.  Little guys like him can eat up to 1,200 mosquito-sized insects per hour! He's a great friend to have "hanging around" Ao4 Headquarters!

Yours sincerely,
Margaret Thatcher