Big Brown Woes

This is the story of one of the many Big Brown bats we have caught thus far. This particular bat gets its own story because we put a transmitter on it. It was one of the five bats we have been tracking these past few weeks. To be honest, we all kinda thought the bat was not the brightest crayon in the box. The second day of telemetry I tracked her to a tiny live tree, in a terribly dense area. It took me a while to decide which tree I thought was the one in which the bat was roosting. Finally, I determined it was this one particular red maple and put down my pack to begin processing the tree. As I started processing, I looked up at the tree and realized, oh hey. There is the bat! Right there. Just sitting on the truck. Out in the open for anyone (including predators) to see. To say I was surprised would be an understatement. For anyone out there who doesn't know, bats do not normally roost on the trunks of trees. They are normally under exfoliating bark, or in cracks or crevasses. So, seeing one sitting out in the open was very odd. A few days later, Abby tracked her to a downed tree. Also a very odd place for a bat to be roosting. Then, that night while doing an emergence count, she once again saw the bat on the outside of the tree and watched her climb up a stump, go over to another tree, climb a bit and finally, eventually, fly off. By this point, we were all just saying how this bat was dumb. She was behaving so oddly and choosing such terrible places to roost. After that she was tracked to the barn and then to a neighborhood where she was just in a live tree in someone's backyard. From there she went a few streets down to another private property. We got permission from the owners and it ended up that the signal was strongest towards the house so we figured she was in the house somewhere (tucked under a crack in the siding or something). We didn't do an emergence count there that night, but the next day she was still there so we went to do an emergence count there that night, just to see if any other bats were using that house as a roost spot. Saw absolutely no bats emerge, and the signal never left. That is when I began to be concerned. I wasn't working the next day but I told Miles that he and Abby should check around the ground if the signal was still there the next day. Turned out it was. And they found the bat, dead, on the ground near the house. :( Needless to say, we all felt badly that we had made fun of her and called her dumb, when it seems like there is a decent chance she was sick. Poor bat. :( We are sending the carcass to someone in the hopes of learning what was wrong with her. In the meantime, sincerest apologies to said bat for doubting her intelligence.

Flying Squirrels and Busy Days

Well, it's been a while once again. My main excuse is that we have been incredibly busy. These past two weeks we have essentially had 5 bats out with transmitters that we have been tracking during the day. Which is a lot. Thankfully a good number of them basically stayed in the barn, but there were two that did not hang out in the barn, and instead liked to change roost trees every single day. Made for some fun times. Luckily, the one Long-eared bat stayed within the same general quarter mile stretch of swamp, which made it a tad bit easier, even though she kept changing trees nearly every single day. And mind you, she was never choosing "good" roost trees. Nope. We seem to be catching the bats that prefer to roost in mostly live trees. Very unusual behavior. Not sure if we are just getting outliers, or if this is an overarching behavior change that is happening... are the bats suddenly roosting more solitarily, rather than in big dead trees with tons of other bats (the usual maternity-type roosts). Guess we'll just have to see where other bats that we catch and transmitter in this second half of the study (from July 15th on) choose to roost. 

So yes, very busy doing telemetry during the day time and roost emergence counts at night. We quickly got behind because according to the original protocol, we were supposed to conduct two emergence counts on every new roost. Since we had 5 bats at once and at least two of them were picking new trees every day, you can imagine how this quickly got out of hand. It was definitely overwhelming. We just did the best we could and got as many volunteers to help us as we could (although there is only so much a volunteer could do... usually one of us needed to be with them, because we couldn't send one out into the swamp on their own). In the end Jenny decided that we had better just try to get one emergence count on each tree. Which definitely helped make things a bit more manageable. We are now nearly caught up.

While all of this was going on, we also needed to find sites to set out the passive acoustic equipment and we started doing the active acoustic work at night as well. Thankfully, we had the contractors mist netting for us, and so that was taken care of. Unfortunately, with all we were doing, we did not get to go out with them very much, but we did try to whenever possible. I think I made it out with them once or twice in July. It was always really nice to get out at night again and get to see and handle the bats (even if we did pretty much only catch big browns). 

Unfortunately, about 5 days ago two of our bats went MIA. They had been at the barn the whole time and suddenly, they just vanished. Drove all over the place and could not pick up a signal anywhere. They are still among the missing. Tomorrow is the last day of the transmitter life for one of them so chances are we will not find them again, which is unfortunate. It also made these past few days a bit frustrating as most of our time was spent driving around searching, without success, for these bats. Ah well.

The contractors have now gone, and so we are back to being the ones to do mist netting. We will only net twice a week (more if we can, but the goal is to have a minimum of two nights a week). This past week I went netting both Wednesday (the 11th) and Thursday (the 12th) night. We went to a site we had yet to go to, that is on the complete other side of the refuge, behind one of the local police stations (it borders the refuge). The first night I arrived late, after doing an emergence count. Got there just in time to help process three big brown bats that they had just caught (perfect timing!). Turned out those we the only bats we caught all night. We did, however, unintentionally catch a few flying squirrels. It was my first experience actually seeing a flying squirrel. They are quite cute, but it is hard to acknowledge that, when they are doing their best to chew a massive hole in our nets and are incredibly dumb about getting out of the nets. We try not to handle them, because they apparently have a strong bite, and so we try to just maneuver the net so they can get out by crawling on a stick. Easier said than done. On Thursday night, I was there from start to finish. It was a fairly slow bat night... just a few big browns and one long-eared (which we couldn't outfit with a transmitter because we are waiting for new transmitters to be sent to us). However, we started joking that we had one bat net and one flying squirrel net because one of the nets caught zero bats, but I think either two or three flying squirrels throughout the night. It gets to the point where we say, 'dammit! there's another stupid flying squirrel in our net'. Ah well. I guess the upside is that I can now say that I have seen plenty of flying squirrels! No pictures to share, cause we were always trying to get them out of the net as quickly as possible so they could do as little damage as possible. Apologies.

Cannot believe we only have four weeks left. Where did the time go?!