Chiroptera Monthly
a newsletter for citizen scientists
november bat news!
Porter County Chapter WISHES YOU A BATTY THANKSGIVING!
You are among the first 100 citizen scientists to become part of this program, Congratulations! The Izaak Walton League is thankful for your participation. The more people know about an area of conservation concern, the quicker it is to repair the damage. Citizens become scientists, active voters, meeting attendees, supporters and volunteers. Thanks for listening!
What got it all started in 2018 for pcc's bat project
WORKING THE NIGHT SHIFT (click to see entire article)
NWITIMES, Oct 27, 2018 by Doug Ross
If bats bug you, think of what bats do to bugs. “One little brown bat can eat 60 medium-sized moths, or over 1,000 mosquito-sized insects in one night,” Joy Marburger said. “They provide very vital services such as insect control, flower pollination and seed dispersal,” she said.
The little brown bat is one of 13 bat species that call Indiana home at least part of the year, Marburger said. While they are portrayed as scary creatures especially around Halloween because of the lore surrounding vampires taking on bat form to get around, what may be even scarier is a world without the hard-working, insect-devouring critters. And some bat populations have been steadily disappearing over the years, which concerns scientists.
Marburger retired in 2015 as research coordinator for the National Park Service in the Great Lakes region, based at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in Porter. She and Tammy Patterson, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher based in Porter, spoke recently to the Valparaiso Chain of Lakes Watershed Group. In 2005, a research project at the national park here captured bats in nets, put bands on them and counted them to gauge the health of the bat population, she said. “We didn’t have the technology back then that we do now,” she said.
The Izaak Walton League bought a bat detector for the local researchers that Patterson uses. The U.S. Geological Survey bought the software. By changing the frequency, the device allows humans to be able to hear bat calls. “Thirty species of bats actually sing like birds,” a fact researchers learned relatively recently, Patterson said. “It’s really exciting how technology is evolving,” she said.
building pcc's bat monitoring program
IWLA-PCC is now spending the winter building up partners, equipment and citizen science protocol for the bats who will become active in NW Indiana. Tell your friends about PCC's Bat Adoption program so they can be on 'wing' for all the exciting citizen science this summer!
Bats In Indiana
Bats are fascinating creatures. They are the only mammal capable of true flight, and they use sonar (echolocation) to navigate through their environment and capture prey. All bats that occur in Indiana are insectivores, meaning they eat insects. A bat feeding on beetles, mosquitoes and moths can eat half of its body weight each night, an attribute that makes them extremely beneficial to humans. Many insects eaten by bats are harmful agricultural and forest pests. It is estimated that the economic impact to the agricultural industry due to the loss of insect-eating bats in North America could exceed $3.7 billion per year.
Thirteen bat species have been documented in Indiana. Six species primarily use underground sites such as caves, mines, or tunnels to hibernate in winter. They use caves, trees and/or other structures for summer roosts. Four species are found in Indiana either during the summer reproductive season or spring and fall migration. The remaining three species are exceedingly rare in Indiana; the few records for these species are from caves during winter hibernation.
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"There was that one time that a bat got into my grandma's house and....."