Batty About Bats...

Over the years I have been fortunate enough to work with some really cool people studying bats.  Bats are often poorly understood by the general public and unfortunately have an undeserved reputation as being creepy.  This misconception could not be further from the truth!  In reality, they are gentle creatures who care for their young and eat more insects than you could even imagine.  They are really quite beautiful when viewed up close - a perfect example is this Eastern Red Bat (Lasiurus borealis)...

Bats are in the order Chiroptera which means "hand wing" or "winged hand" aptly named because those bones in their wings are actually their fingers.  Bats are the only mammal capable of powered flight (versus gliding like my Glaucomys pals).  And even more awesome - their knees bend backward making them capable of catching insects with their webbed tails and of doing things like this...

Sadly, many bat species are in serious decline and scientists are working hard to understand and combat a fairly recent discovery of a bat illness called white-nose syndrome (WNS) that has been decimating bat populations across the eastern United States.  WNS gets it's name from a fungus called Geomyces destructans that often grows in little tufts on bat noses.  WNS basically causes bats to use up their winter fat reserves earlier than usual.  Many of the afflicted bats emerge from their hibernacula too soon - only to find the world still in the depths of winter.  With nothing to eat, the bats freeze and/or starve to death.  In the five years since the discovery of WNS in New York, over 5.7 million bats have died and WNS has been confirmed in 18 states and also in Canada. Terrible you say?  How can I help you say?  There exists a wonderful group of bat conservationists called Bat Conservation International (BCI) and if you're looking for a good cause to donate to, this is it!  When you become a member of BCI you know you're helping bats all over the world AND helping scientists battle WNS here in the States.  

Back in the days before WNS, capturing and handling bats was a much simpler task where a new pair of surgical gloves for every bat and strict decontamination protocols were still a thing of the future.  In these pre-WNS photos of a federally endangered Indiana Bat (Myotis sodalis) you can see the arm band and the antenna of the temporary radio transmitter that we used to track his movements...

I've noticed fewer and fewer bats in my yard over the last few summers.  This year on St. Patrick's Day I had a bat foraging in my yard during broad daylight.  My theory is that it was too cold at night for bugs but warm enough during the day for hatches of flying insects.  This little guy must have been pretty hungry and opportunistic to be out and about...

After consulting with some of those aforementioned pretty cool people, it is likely that this St. Paddy Bat was a Northern Myotis (Myotis septentrionalis).  I felt pretty lucky to even have a possible myotis species in my yard as members of this genus have been hit pretty hard by WNS.

While there is absolutely no reason to be freaked out by bats, there is reason to be freaked out by the recent decimation of once healthy bat populations.  It is quite possible species that were fairly common in the not-so-distant past will someday be listed as endangered.  I really hope the situation doesn't come to that and maybe the bat house I put up last year will one day even have residents...

   
Hopefully the battle against WNS will someday be won and the future for bats will be better.  Our world would certainly not be the same without them.