Stories
Ted Turner Ranch Shelters Over One Million Bats in Ancient Lava Caves
- •More than a million Mexican free-tailed bats emerge from ancient lava tubes at the Armendaris Ranch in New Mexico every summer evening.
- •The Jornada Bat Caves span a network of underground tubes formed within the Jornada lava field, providing seasonal shelter for a massive maternal and migratory bat colony.
- •The caves were historically used for bat guano mining from the late 19th century until the 1980s, which damaged parts of the habitat before conservation efforts began.
- •Conservation groups, including The Nature Conservancy and media pioneer Ted Turner, worked to acquire mineral rights and restore the caves for wildlife protection.
- •Ted Turner Reserves offers limited summer Bat Flight Expeditions to allow visitors to watch the spectacular evening emergence while funding ongoing conservation work.
Key Questions Answered
Ted Turner Reserves describes summer evening emergences involving more than 1 million Mexican free-tailed bats, while The Nature Conservancy notes a maternal colony of over 100,000 alongside millions of migratory bats using the caves as a warm-season stopover.
For decades from the late 19th century into the 1980s, bat guano was mined from the lava tubes and used as fertilizer. Miners blasted openings into the cave roofs to ease extraction, which let in light and reduced habitat quality until conservation efforts and mineral rights donations changed the site's future.
The Jornada Bat Caves are generally closed to the general public to minimize disturbance to the animals, though Ted Turner Reserves offers an authorized summer Bat Flight Expedition between June and August.
