ANACORTES — On a quest for creepy creatures, a group of adventurers dared the eerie dark and damp of an old mining cave in hopes of a glimpse at the more terrifying side of nature Saturday.
About 30 children and adults walked along Little Cranberry Lake on a trail lined with vibrant yellow fall maple leaves to a place known to house moths, spiders, bees and bats.
Halloween lingered with the group from the night before — even the wasps could sense it. Several swarmed around a group of huddled children.
“They can smell the sugar,” said the adventurers’ leader, Denise Crowe of Anacortes, referring to the trick-or-treat candy the children had been snacking on since Friday night. “Look where they are going.”
Crowe is the education and outreach coordinator with the nonprofit group Friends of the Anacortes Community Forest Lands, which sponsored the annual bat cave hike in Anacortes.
She said outdoor activities like the bat cave hike — to explore the darker side of nature in the spirit of Halloween — help children to interact and understand nature in a fun way.
“This is one way to help kids to connect with the abundant nature that we have here,” she said. “They’re hungry for it.”
The destination cave had been an old copper test mine, which yielded too little copper to be of any value, Crowe said. Now, it houses a number of creatures that can make both children and adults squeamish — if they can brave the darkness to go see them.
The hope was to find an elusive fall critter known to inhabit the cave in September and October.
“Bats are mysterious creatures because it’s very hard to see them and observe them and know what they are doing,” Crowe said.
Bats are nocturnal. They hide in dark places during the day to sleep and emerge at night to feed. Noises scare them away, which makes it difficult for humans to get a good look at them, Crowe said.
“It’s too scary,” said 3-year-old Peyton Kijek at the mouth of the cave.
He and his 6-year-old brother Riley were visiting from Oak Harbor.
“It’s too dark in there,” the blond-haired boy said as he reached for his mom’s hand. “Bats.”
Then, the youngster decided it was time to conquer his fears and delve into the cave.
Inside, relatives of the daddy long leg spiders covered the walls.
“Look, they dance in the light,” Crowe said as she pointed her flashlight at the rock wall of the cave covered in the squirmy arachnids.
That was enough for Scottie Schneider.
“I’m not doing the spider thing,” the Mount Vernon woman said as she walked out of the cave. “It’s a little too creepy.”
Peyton had the opposite reaction.
“I want to go again,” he said immediately after he ducked out of the cave.
Beside the colonies of spiders were families of moths clinging to the cave wall, their colors blending into the copper veins and rock behind them.
“What’s really mysterious is that these moths and spiders seem to interact peacefully,” Crowe said.
No bats were to be seen Saturday. They must have chosen other dark places to roost for Halloween, Crowe said.
Eight-year-old Giulia Wood was slightly disappointed by not finding a bat in the cave but said she enjoyed the fear she felt during the trip.
“I just like being in dark places that freak me out,” Giulia said. “It kind of makes me feel good doing something that I wouldn’t normally do.”
That feeling, she said, is bravery.
• Tahlia Ganser can be reached at 360-416-2148 or at
tganser@skagitvalleyherald.com tganser@skagitvalleyherald.com tganser@skagitvalleyherald.com.
No sooner does our young Forest Discovery group reach Little Cranberry, than they head to the water, sending frogs and tadpoles scattering from the rocky shore. Although shrieks of delight from the children are heard at the sighting of every tadpole, I flinch and shake my head in concern. These tadpoles are not of the native red-legged and pacific chorus frog variety, but are non-native bullfrog tadpoles. Their numbers have been increasing over the past few years in local wetlands.
With the increase in bullfrog numbers, we don’t know how local amphibian populations have been coping. Research at the University of Victoria is looking at the impact of bullfrogs on native amphibian populations as I write. We do know, howe v e r, in many other areas of the United States bullfrogs have contributed to the decline of native amphibian species, such as the threatened red-legged frog. Although many see only cute tadpoles or hear beautiful croaking, bullfrogs pose a significant threat to the health of our local waters.