Hectic one night, dead the next

Wednesday night we resumed our mist-netting. This time we set up in a different area... not over water, but rather in a corridor of the woods, with decent canopy cover, where we had picked up a reasonable level of activity with the acoustic detectors.

Each week someone is the designated 'clean person', and they do not handle any bats. Their sole job is writing down data and cleaning all the instruments between bats (part of the decon protocol). Since I handled a bat already and Jenny and Abby hadn't and Sarah wasn't feeling well, I volunteered to be the clean person. As per usual, we set up camp, and then opened the two nets around 9pm. Immediately we caught a red bat in one net (absolutely gorgeous! I love red bats) and a big brown in the other. Off to a good start we thought. From then on their was a steady flow... and then it got crazy, with four or five bats in the net each time we did a net check. It got overwhelming really quickly. But I did my best to work as quickly as possible, while still accurately recording data and doing everything that needed to be done. On the positive side, time FLEW by. Suddenly it was 1:30am. We actually closed the nets from 12:50 til 1:30 because we were getting backed up with bats and it was going to be too much if we continued to catch things. When we reopened them, we didn't end up catching anything for the last half an hour. So  from 1:30 til 2am we were actually able to sit down a bit which was nice. One of the coolest things of the night (aside from the red bat) was when we had a recapture. We caught a bat that was already banded from a previous year. It will be neat to go back and look at the data and determine when it was first caught and compare measurements on it from back then to now. :) 

By the end of the night our total was 17bats - 1 red and the rest big browns. So awesome that we got such a high number of bats, but less awesome that they were practically all the same species. We are really aiming to catch any of the Myotis species. Turns out where we placed the nets was prime big brown habitat so it isn't surprising that that is what we mostly captured. 


We went out mist-netting again on Thursday night, but in a different area. This time we set up in more narrow corridors near water, in an area where they have captured Myotis species in previous years, and where we have heard activity with the acoustic detectors. Did run into some difficulty during the set-up, in that it was hard to fit a 9m net across the one corridor, while keeping it out of the way of branches. It took a very long time and it ended up having to be quite on an angle to get it to fit, and by the time it was up we just left it open because it was close to 9pm. The other net went up fairly easily and we thought it was in a pretty great location. I figured if we caught anything, it would be in that net. I was mistaken. We only caught one bat the whole night (guess which species? yup. a big brown) and it was in the net that was angled. Ended up closing an hour early since we just weren't catching anything. So as busy as Wednesday night was, Thursday night was suuuuuper slow. I did handle the one bat we did catch, which was good to get more experience. It took me a while to get it out of the net, and Marilyn had to help me... it's one wing was really badly tangled. But eventually we got it out and got it processed. 

working on taking the big brown bat out of the net

The fact that we had so little success on Thursday night was definitely disheartening but we are trying not to let it get us down. Our hope is that it was just an off night, and also that since we are still new to netting and the whole process, that we aren't putting nets in the best of places. But in the back of all of our minds is the nagging fear that we aren't catching any Myotis species because they simply aren't around any more as a result of white-nose syndrome. Still really hoping that isn't the case though. Starting this week we have a group of contractors coming out to trap for 18 days straight pretty much, aiming for Indiana bats and helping us get transmitters on any Myotis they might catch. We will go out with them when we can to get more practice and then hopefully we will start tracking bats during the day if we get transmitters out. So, we're hoping that these contractors, who have been mist-netting a LOT and know what they are doing, will have better luck catching the Myotis bats. If, after their first week out they don't have any luck either, I will be concerned. But for now I am trying to keep my worries at bay. 

So that was mist-netting for this week. It was definitely a busy week, with lots of night work, and by Friday it had finally caught up to me. But we had a nice long weekend to rest up and now we're ready to start week 2. Hopefully we'll have more luck catching Myotis this week. We shall see!