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.