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Cool Creatures of the Night
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2016/08 - August
It’s 7:00 P.M., T minus two hours and counting until sunset. That’s when the bats rouse from their leafy beds and crevices and the nighttime feasting on insects begins.
North Carolina Wildlife Diversity Biologist Katherine Caldwell and her team, wildlife technicians Joey Weber and Charles Lawson, have already set up poles and netting at four stations spread over 100 yards of Forest Service gravel road near a creek. It’s a perfect habitat in which to catch, examine, and record characteristics like sex, reproductive condition, and forearm length. Then they band (jokingly called, “giving them jewelry”) and release them.
I observed the capture/release of five Eastern Red Bats (Lasiurus borealis). Up close they were tiny-cute-peach-fuzzy-beautiful. And their echo-clicks sounded like a miniature wind-up toy. By night’s end a total of 21 bats of four species were inspected, up from last year’s count by about a third. Good sign!
The team’s been doing this since 2004. In 2011 a wave of imported White Nose Syndrome hit Western North Carolina. That marks the onslaught of an epidemic of catastrophic proportion, threatening to wipe out some bat species unless Mother Nature or scientists come up with countermeasures.
Katherine says, “Little Brown Bats were the most numerous bat captured at the site before WNS, but they have not been caught there since 2013. We regularly caught Northern Long-Eared Bats (Myotis septentrionalis) and Tri-Colored Bats (Perimyotis subflavus). Now we catch hardly any.”
The highest bat count at that site was 91 before the epidemic hit.
What is WNS and what can we do to prevent it? Find out in next month’s installment, Part Two of Cool Creatures of the Night.
Until then, learn more about these unique mosquito-gobblers. With all the panic about mosquito-borne, life-threatening disease, you’ll want to check out simple bat house instructions at batcon.org. A single bat can consume 1,200 mosquito-sized insects/hour. It’s worth the effort to support a small colony in your own bat-yard!
