Arches National Park - Creatures of the Night

At night, when the lovely but ominous sacred datura (it contains a powerful narcotic) unfurls its fragrant white flowers, animals emerge from burrows and shady nooks to feed. Pugnacious collared lizards, their skins all bejeweled with dots of blue, green, and turquoise, hunt spiders, insects, snakes, and even other lizards. Giving chase, the foot-long reptiles can rear up on their hind legs and run like miniature tyrannosaurs.

Black-tailed jackrabbits and desert cottontails come out at dusk, and so do the gray foxes, kit foxes, bobcats, and coyotes that hunt them. Mule deer browse the brushy uplands and rest in secluded clumps of trees between the fins, their large ears constantly atwitch to catch the sounds of danger. Their greatest threat comes from the tawny mountain lion, stealthy and powerful. Each of the 200-pound cats kills and eats and average of one deer a week and supplements its diet with rodents and other small mammals.

Only after night has fallen does the skittish little ringtail emerge from the grass-lined rocky den or hollow tree where it spends the day. An agile cousin of the raccoon, with half its more than 2-foot length invested in its bushy, banded tail, it hunts rodents and lizards among the rocks where it lives, and climbs trees after roosting birds and their eggs. Well before the first gray light of down, it joins its mate in the darkness of its den.

Few creatures are abroad in the heat of the day. White-tailed antelope squirrels, rock squirrels, and Colorado chipmunks scurry after seeds while trying to avoid the watchful eyes of soaring golden eagles and red-tailed hawks. Raucous pinyon jays and busy little titmice flock among the branches of the pinyon and juniper woodlands, ravens scavenge everywhere for food, and common flickers pick for ants in dunes and for grubs beneath the bark of trees.
This vast gallery of nature's masterworks is home to these creatures, and they inhabit it comfortably, but their quick spirit is not the true heart of Arches. Here, where monolithic stone figures are born and flourish and die, their lives are but flickers, as are ours. It is the arches themselves that are this park's measure of time.