A Close Encounter With Bats at the Elizabeth Mine in Strafford
Imagine you’re a bat. A romantically inclined bat, who’s looking forward to a rendezvous with a special someone. As you fly out of your mine tunnel - looking every centimeter the winged mammalian hottie in your copper-dust bling - you’re momentarily distracted by a juicy mosquito hors d’oeuvre hovering nearby.
You crash into a net. Some guy grabs you and carries you over to his friends. They identify your species and gender, then proceed to make rude personal observations about your weight, sexual maturity and wing scars. Before they release you, they daub your belly with talcum powder.
Such was the plight of ninety-five bats on a recent evening at the Elizabeth Mine in Strafford. The bats flew out of the mine looking for love but instead found Scott Darling of Vermont Fish & Wildlife. Scott, along with a team of state and federal wildlife management colleagues, inspected the bats as part of a larger effort to determine the impact of the recent white-nose syndrome epidemic.
I was “invited” on this excursion after seeing Scott give a presentation at an event hosted by the nonprofit Vermont Coverts: Woodlands for Wildlife. Using strong eye contact and aggressive body posture, I made clear that there was no way he would reach his truck in the parking lot unless he first agreed to let me go bat catching with him. He gave in quickly. I think he was in shock that someone actually wanted a close encounter with bats. After all, this is a guy whose job description includes answering frequent phone calls from panicked Vermonters, informing him that they are cowering under their furniture while flying fur balls perform air wheelies around the room.
I don’t want bats in my house, but I do like them and think they’re due for a public relations makeover. O.K., sure, they have sharp teeth and can be rabies vectors. However, bats aren’t aggressive, rarely turn into undead Transylvanian aristocracy, don’t drink blood north of Mexico, and they evolved from cute and cuddly lemurs a mere 53 million years ago. Bats also eat a huge number of mosquitoes and other flying insects. For example, the common little brown bat gobbles down an estimated 600 bugs an hour. For this reason alone, gardeners and other outdoor enthusiasts should be grateful and not begrudge the occasional indoor air wheelie incident.
More appreciation and tolerance is especially appropriate right now, because bats are under severe stress. White-nose syndrome, a disease named for the white fungus that appears on infected bats, is spreading quickly across New England, killing thousands of bats each year. Researchers are still struggling to answer basic questions about white-nose syndrome, such as when and how infection occurs.
In order to gather data to help answer these questions, Scott and his colleagues conducted a series of bat catching efforts across Vermont this September, timed to coincide with fall mating swarms. At the Elizabeth Mine, the team set up their catch site high on a slope above a bedrock cut. They erected two six foot “harp” nets at either end of an alley of saplings, then readied measurement equipment including a scale, calipers and two makeshift “light boxes.” The latter, shoe boxes containing battery operated lights with paper stretched over the top, provided a gentle way to illuminate bats’ wings. Scott explained that extensive scarring on the wings, especially in spot patterns, may be indicative of previous fungus infections.
Soon bats began swooping through the catch site. I was amazed, and a little unnerved, by how closely some bats flew by – within inches of my face, and on one occasion under my raised arm. However, as the team began to measure netted bats, I began to feel less nervous, and more sorry for the animals. Chittering distress and sometimes biting their handlers’ thick latex gloves, the bats were obviously having a bad start to their night. They seemed to recover from the trauma quickly, however; after the team took the bats’ measurements and applied the talcum powder marking (done to avoid duplicate measurements of recaptured bats), the bats wasted no time launching up from their captors’ hands into the air.
Over the course of the evening, I learned that bat identification is a subtle art. Slight variations in face color and differences in the structures of the inner ear are important but difficult-to-discern identifiers. Especially hard to determine, at this time of year, is the difference between adult and juvenile females. I’ll always cherish the memory of watching Scott and a colleague earnestly blowing on bats’ nipples and debating the size of their cleavage.
At the end of the catch session, I was feeling encouraged by the number of bats we’d seen. Then Scott informed me that, in roughly the same time period two years previously, his team had netted about six hundred bats. Also worrying was the high incidence of wing scars, suggesting that white-nose syndrome is well established in the region.
So how can people help bats? To avoid stressing the animals, stay away from their hibernation sites. Tolerate their presence in structures such as barns, where they’re unlikely to pose any contact risk to humans. Woodlot owners may want to consider what kind of habitat enhancements would boost the success of bats’ summer maternity colonies. A resource for this and other bat information is the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife’s website: http://www.vtfishandwildlife.com.