We want people to know that when bats swoop down low inside a building, they are not attacking, they are simply desperately thirsty!

This little red bat was trapped in a FedEx warehouse and was panicked and exhausted from dodging forklifts and floor polishers.  She was desperately thirsty and repeatedly skimmed what, in the natural world, would have to be water.

Bats’ echlocation calls bounce away off flat shiny surfaces, instead of back at them, so millions of years of evolution tell them the only thing that has that characteristic (in nature) is water.

Her exertions only gave her a tounge full of floor wax instead of water and after a long while she collapsed on the floor, completely spent.
Steve and co-workers came to the rescue and contained her and brought her to the refuge. Thanks so much y’all!


She had had it with humans by the time she came to us and was as feisty as can be, and that’s saying a lot for a red bat!
We fed and watered her as much as she would let us, and soon it was obvious that she was really wanted to go.

So at midnight, after one last long drink of water and a few more mealworms, we sent her back to the wild from the release platform.

All the best little bat!  Thanks for the visit!

 

 


What a great illustration of a moth jamming a bat’s echolocation!
Illustration by Chris Tullar from Aaron Corcoran.
This is a great depiction of what goes on in our flight cage every night (albeit with different species)!

Bats have been echolocating for around 25 million years and moths have been evolving defenses against them for just as long.
A bat has to be at the top of its game to make a living out there.

moth jamming bat


Hola from Costa Rica,

 

Just a quick recap, in case you have not read my previous blog posts! I am currently in Costa Rica using two Wildlife Acoustics SM4Bat full spectrum recorders to track bat presence and activity across the country over a ten-week period. My plan is to collect data here and, upon returning to the U.S., running the data through the Kaleidoscope Pro acoustic analysis program with auto-ID technology to try to determine what bats we find where.

 

This is the beginning of my seventh week in the country and my second week at Las Cruces Biological Station. Last week we conducted our research at the station. The week prior, we were in Manuel Antonio, a very popular tourist town on the coast known for its National Park and beautiful beaches. This week and the next we are visiting privately owned plots of land with forest fragments.  I did very little research in Manuel Antonio because I did not feel comfortable leaving my recorders overnight unattended in such a heavily populated place. I can easily lock the recording box to the tree with a heavy-duty lock, but the microphone and cable attach to the outside and could be easily removed and stolen. So, always take care of your equipment, first and foremost. Because, if you lose your equipment, you lose your experiment.

 

I consider this blog a way to impart wisdom on future researchers and animal activists. I have learned a lot while traveling the country and visiting different research stations and locations. Please, do not take anything I say as complaining or badmouthing, I just want to share information and experiences. We have come across some quote unquote issues while being here that I wish I could have foreseen.

  1. Some institutions issue their stipends differently than others; some will pay you in full upfront, some will pay you half when you start and half when you finish, and some will pay you biweekly. Also, if you get paid biweekly, (like any other job) you may be paid a pay period behind schedule and therefore not receive payment until the end of the first month you are there. This is something you should figure out before you leave for your trip and plan your finances accordingly. We have experienced some difficulties in stipend distribution amongst the group members (e.g. some people being paid weekly and some biweekly and some not the full amount). I am sure this will all work out in the end, but it is something I absolutely did not consider to be possible. Also, a few of our visits were to ecotourist businesses where we had to pay out of pocket entrance fees. We will be reimbursed for this later, but, it would have been nice to know beforehand. I feel like this is a weird policy because it is imposing a personal cost on researchers who may or may not have the funds, but apparently it is a pretty common practice.
  2. We had a box of equipment get stuck in customs for over 3 weeks, causing some serious delays in other peoples’ parts of the project, especially since we have moved locations. Anything you think you may need extras of, even if you think “it will be ok”, get them before you leave the country or make sure you have an in-country vendor. The only equipment of mind that I am missing out on are extra microphone covers. The first night I put my recorders out for a test run at La Selva, something chewed a hold in one of my microphone covers. It was only then that I realized, maybe it would have been useful to have extras! Oops! Thankfully the cover was not chewed completely as to where it affected the weatherproof-ness.

 

We are still in the field almost every day. I have 29 days left here before I return to the US to parse through my data and decipher the implications of what I have found. I am really excited and equally nervous to be responsible for going through ten weeks of data! On average, my recorders pick up 1,000 calls a night. But, in some locations, I have picked up as few as 3 calls to over 4,500 recordings in a night. At the sites where I can get 4+ consecutive nights of data, trends start to emerge. My ideal study design would be to have 10+ recorders spread across the country with extra extra large SD cards so they could be left for months at a time, showing temporal and spatial patterns of bat presence and activity. I have made some pretty interesting scatter plots of activity, just playing around with what I have so far. I will share what I am allowed when I can…later!

 

I want to end this blog on a positive note. As mentioned in my previous blogs, there is a girl doing research on the social implications of payment for ecosystem services (where people are paid by the government to not cut down the forest on their property, hence paying them for the services the remaining ecosystem provides). She has found that people in this area are much better informed of the benefits of having bats on their property and in their forests and on their farms. There is less fear and more excitement over bats. They see them as something necessary and without which, the forest would suffer. She reminds me people across the world do not all have the same information and associations we do about our flying friends. What we, as concerned and caring citizens of the world, need to do is have patience and understanding, spreading positive and informative narratives of bats. All it takes is conversation and interaction to change a mind and influence the future.

 

As always, feel free to contact me with questions or comments (ahall6@stedwards.edu).

 

Squeak squeak,

Amy


Went batting last night in East Austin.  Picked up mostly Tabr (Mexican free-tailed bats) around Mueller Lake Park.  Walking through an adjoining neighborhood with streets overhung with elm trees we picked up a beautiful call sequence from a tri-colored bat (Perymyotis subflavus), loud and clear.

We’ve released quite a few over the last year, one earlier this spring.  Wonder if that’s her?

tri-colored bat call sequence


What a great week this has been out in Tucson, Arizona!  We got to participate in the first bat echolocation symposium that has taken place for 15 years, as experts from around the world discussed their life-long research on bat neurophysiology, bat behavioral ecology, and bat conservation science.

bat echolocation symposium tucson  bat echolocation symposium Tucson

Below left:  A call sequence from a Myotis yumanensis (Yuma myotis) recorded during the Symposium.
Below right: An analysed call taken from that sequence.
bat detectors  bat detectors, bat walk
Below: Passive monitoring during the Symposium.  The Sonoran Desert had sprung to life that week.  The ocotillo was blooming everywhere.
passive monitoring at the Symposiumpassive monitoring setup
Below:  Active monitoring under the palms at a Tucson park.  Western yellows and velifers were common.
bat walk Tucson next in Austin

Below:  The group gathers at dusk, cementing new friendships over a last night of batting.
Chris Corben creator of Anabat, and Joe Szewczak creator of SonoBat, shared their expertise.
bat eholocation bat detectors

Below: How wonderful to see these bat experts, know to us previously only by their research, out in the field celebrating the joy of batting.  There some bat big shots in this walkabout and they all retain the sense of wonder that drew them to the field.
bat detectors, echolocation

Joe Szewczak (left) shares with Martyn, Toby, Alice, Katherine, and Brian.
bat detectors, echolocation

Thanks so much everyone for freely sharing your knowledge and vision all for the greater good of bat conservation.
We dearly hope it will lead to a lifetime of collaboration and friendships.

 


We had a great time last night conducting a Bat Walk to mark the third anniversary of the founding of Shoal Creek Conservancy, here in Austin.
Bat fans showed up on the second night of cool weather to see if bats would fly from under the 9th St. Bridge in Duncan Park.
Though the cool weather felt great to us after a long extended hot summer, the bats were snug in their expansion-joint crevices under the bridge and did not want to drop out into the cool night.  The temperature had dropped to 43 degrees F the previous night and that night’s dew point of 47 F promised another cool night ahead.  Since fewer insects fly below 50 F, they must have decided to conserve their energy budget and stay snug in the roost.  Here’s a thermal imaging snapshot of the crevice we inspected.

thermal image crevice 9th St. Bridge Duncan Park

Those are bat bodies showing white and their reading was about 88 deg F on the outside of their fur.  Their body heat kept the crevice nice and warm, 82.6 deg F here next to the bats in this snapshot, 15 degrees warmer than the blue-colored bridge outside the crevice.  It would take a lot of snuggling to re-create all that warmth, so perhaps they just hunkered down to wait out the cooler nights.  Low temps will be back in the 60s for the next two weeks, so I think they made the right call.

Great group of people at Shoal Creek Conservancy; we’re so happy there is a unified voice to speak up on behalf of beautiful Shoal Creek!
Thanks to all who came out to hear our talk and watch our radar images of Central Texas bat activity.  Next year we’ll unveil the new SonoBat Live and if we get a warmer night, we’ll all be able to see real time sonograms of the echolocation calls of flying bats.