HURRAY!

It does not take much to make me crazy happy. Tonight we went out netting with the contractors. Went back to the river site where we first netted, but this time we put out a total of three nets, one over the larger river, and two over the smaller river. Started out with a decent number of bats coming in, mostly big browns with one red bat. All that was great. Then things slowed a bit with just the occasional bat.

First Myotis septentrionalis caught this summer

And then, just when we were thinking we were going to have another Myotis-free night..... WE CAUGHT ONE! At 12:20am in our net over the large river, we caught a female Northern Long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis). We were all crazy excited. It was awesome. So this bat had the privilege of being the first cave-hibernating species (that wasn't a big brown) to be seen by us on the refuge this summer. It was frankly a huge relief. Just to know that there are at least some still out there. The concern of everyone is that due to the effects of white-nose syndrome, the populations of Myotis species were affected so dramatically that they are no longer present on the refuge. So finding at least one was a very good thing. Hopefully we will get more in the coming nights. :) 

after attaching transmitter

This lucky bat got a transmitter put on it, since it was a healthy female of an appropriate weight. Which means that tomorrow (or... you know... in a few hours....) we will start radio tracking! Super excited to track bats once again. Last time was four years ago.. when I was in Australia! Hopefully, it will be a little bit easier than back then. Since we are solely doing day-time telemetry (to find their roost sites so we can get data on where they are roosting and to conduct roost-emergence counts), it should be a little bit easier. I'm still expecting it to be a little challenging just because it has been a while since a did telemetry, and bats are tricky, even when roosting, because they are so small and you have all the bounce-back from trees. So, we'll see how it goes! Tomorrow should be a fun day. Especially in the 95+ degree heat. Yick. Here's hoping this bat roosts somewhere that we can find relatively quickly and painlessly. Or if not, hopefully I'll at least get a good story out of it. :-D