 My name is Rachel Westbrook, and on behalf of the Conservation Commission, I'm really pleased to welcome Barry Genslinger, who is the state's only dedicated rehabber of sick, weak, or injured bats working in a place seen as where Maureen called the Bat Cave, also known as the Vermont Bat Center. They take in 30 to 50 bats a year, and they field calls from all over Vermont, including right here in Randolph, taking in bats when they're found hurt or struggling in places they don't belong. They started out as bat fans, building houses for bats on their property. They later started the Carropera Cabin Company, selling over 4,000 certified bat houses all over North America. Since 2001, Barry has been presenting educational programs to schools and community groups, and we're really excited to have him here with us this evening. Please give him a warm welcome. The thing that makes a successful program about bats is for you to get all your questions answered. I don't know what those are, so I've got a bunch of stuff I can talk about. But while I'm talking, if you come up with a question, ask the question. Don't wait till the end of the program, because you'll forget the question, and I probably won't have answered it. So we also happen to have one very special thing today that will probably not happen in another bat program for a long time. One of our bats that we overwintered actually came from Randolph. Right down the street, our license says we have to release wildlife back where it came from, which is why I'm here today, because I brought the bat with me. And it will be released tonight, down at the golf course. On the night hole. No, no, no. It'll be released. I think I've never been to the golf course, but it looked like a good place to release it at the driving range. If anybody's ever been down there, is that a good place? The bat won't care. The thing about bats is I could have released this bat up in Milton, Vermont, and it would have come back here. It knows where it belongs, and it would have made its way back here. But since I had the bat, and I have to release it near where it came from, I don't have to release it exactly where it came from, because Harvey got it out of his house, and he would not be happy if I released it back in his house. So, at the end of my program, anyone who would like to go down to the golf course, I will be happy to continue talking about the bat that I have there, and how he's doing, and then we'll turn him loose. Now, letting a bat go is one of the least exciting things that you can imagine. You take him out of the cage, you hold him in your hand, you open your hand, he's gone. It's like that quick. So, I always try to give him a couple of mealworms before he takes off, so he's got a little full belly, and he can go out and start eating bugs. So, that'll be exciting. Well, for me, it'll be exciting. You may not care. The bat will be very excited because he's been in this little cage in our hibernation area. It's sound asleep for a long time. So, now we'll let him go, and he'll do what he's supposed to do, which is eat bugs. Well, my guess is that Harvey has some way that that bat got into his house to start with, and the bat knows it. So, within a couple of hours of feeding tonight, he'll be back in the attic. But that's all right. Harvey's at a board meeting up in Burlington, so he won't know. He called me this morning and said, I see from our front porch forum that you're going to be down in Randolph, and I'm going to be up in Burlington at a board meeting. So, I'm going to miss you. And I said, that's all right. We're letting the bat go in your house. All right. So, many people don't know that bats are among the most plentiful mammals on the planet. Bats make up approximately one-fifth of all the mammal species on Earth. As of the count from 2022, there were 1,463 known species of bats. That's more than all the species of cats, dogs, horses, cows, and pigs combined. So, there are lots of different species of bats, and they come from all over the planet. So, I always like to start just with a quick overview, if my fingers will click properly. There we go. A quick overview of the bats from around the world. So, you get an idea of the variety. Most people just think of bats as this kind of ugly brown or dark colored animal, big teeth, flies around, ripping people's jugular veins off. That would be a vampire. We'll talk more about vampire bats in a minute. So, bats take on a variety of forms. I mean, did anybody ever read the book Stella Luna? The author of the book Stella Luna had this particular bat, Wahlberg's epileted fruit bat. Epileps are these little white things right here. And this particular bat has a baby bat that's flying with it, which is the whole impetus for Stella Luna. And the mother bat actually carries the baby bat when it's young and goes out and feeds carrying the baby with her. And in the book Stella Luna, well, Stella wasn't paying very good attention and ended up falling. So, you have to read the book now. I'm not telling you the punchline. So, some bats are very tiny. This bat weighs about the same as a paper clip. Very tiny, very lightweight. And this one, the other end of the spectrum, a fruit bat has a six-foot wingspan. That's the distance from the ends of my fingers. And this one weighs about two pounds. So, you got these little teeny, teeny, teeny ones and these great big ones. If I didn't tell you this was a bat, you might say, oh, what a cute puppy dog. It looks like a puppy dog. It happens to be in the classes of bats called flying foxes because its face resembles the face of a fox. But has great big round eyes and kind of small ears. That tells us one thing about this bat. It's a fruit-eating bat. Fruit-eating bats have big eyes so they can look around and find a fruit tree. They don't have big huge ears because they don't use echolocation to find a fruit tree. They just use their eyes and say, oh, there's a tree, yeah. On the other hand, an insectivore, a bat that eats bugs, needs a way of finding bugs, little tiny bugs in the dark. So it has big ears and kind of small eyes because he doesn't need to see the bug while he's flying along in the dark at 20 miles an hour. He just needs to hear where it is. So he uses his echolocation to focus in on where that bug is. More about that coming up. Some bats have some really strange anatomical features like this nose thing. Biologists call it a nose leaf because it resembles a leaf being stuck on the end of the nose but we're not quite sure what they do with that. Originally it was, oh, bats that are insectivores are the ones with nose leaves. But then there are some fruit-eating bats that have nose leaves so that blew that idea. Some bats have really tiny, tiny, tiny eyes but those big ears are the giveaway. Use the echolocation because it's got those big ears. And here's another with a big nose leaf, big ears, small eyes, if I'm in your whale. You can also look back there because I'm seeing what I'm doing back there. I love this bat with its gold-colored wings. And this, of course, back in the day when I first started doing this, I had lots of bushy hair. Now I don't have hardly any but I had lots of bushy hair and I always thought I should get one of those haircut mohawk things. We call that a mohawk but it actually was from a different tribe. It wasn't from the mohawk Indians. And this guy was in the mind of the person who developed the creatures for gremlins, a movie, back in the day. That freaky little thing. Now this guy is the only slide I've shown you so far that's right side up. All the other ones were upside down because bats hang upside down. The prior anatomy is built to do things upside down. So he's hanging from a tree. He happened to just finish eating a fig. He's a fruit eating bat. We know that because look at those eyes. Big eyes, little ears. Got those epaulets on his ears. So he's hanging upside down. He's got a mouth full of fruit. He's chewing away on the fruit and all the juice from the fig that he just ate is running down into his nose. So I have a video of this guy and his nose is trying to lap all of this juice that's running down into his nose to catch up with it. We call him Figgy Piggy. And these guys, fabulous little tiny, tiny bats. This is another one of those groups that are the very small bats, about an inch and a half tall. And this particular group, beautiful white color, and they live under the leaves. This is looking straight up under the leaf of a palm tree. Now what normally a palm tree leaf goes like this, kind of curves upward. And these bats, if you look closely, you can see where they have chewed along the spine of this leaf all the way across both sides of the spine so that the leaf folded down like this to make a little tent and they live underneath it. And the sunlight coming through the leaf turns that beautiful white fur the appearance of green and they're almost invisible to any predators. What a cool idea. And when the leaf dies because they chew down the spine, they just move to another leaf, make a new tent. And the clever scientists call this one the wrinkle faced bat. I'm not sure why. Some bats have some really odd features like this. And here's Stella Luna again. And this guy has a tongue that is one and a half times the length of its body. The reason it's trying to get something out of that tube is because scientists were trying to figure out a way of measuring the length of the tongue without grabbing it and pulling it. So they just kept adding nectar to a longer and longer tube to see how long, how far down the tube the bat would get its tongue. So what does it do with that tongue when it pulls it back into its mouth? Does it have a mouth full of tongue? Well, no, the tongue is actually anchored here in the top part of the chest. So when it retracts the tongue, it retracts it into the top of the chest rather than in its mouth. So that's why it doesn't choke on its own tongue. Question from the judge. Do I position it all or just a little but not much? Once they get to a tree in the dark, they can use the echolocation so they don't run into branches. All the bat species are capable of echolocation, but Frugivores do not need echolocation to find a tree. It's not very often that a tree runs away from them. So once they see one, they know where they're going. Good question. There are a number of flowers in South America that have very long tubular, I forget the name of that part of the flower, long tubular part of the flower. So the bat sticks his head in the top, but to get at the nectar, he needs that long tongue to get down there. No, it's pulled back into the mouth, but it's anchored into the top of the chest. Our tongues are anchored into the back of our throats, not at the top, but the bottom. So his is just anchored further back, so it can be pulled back in without choking them. These would be among the species of pollinators, yes, and I'll talk more about those. So we got this huge variety of bats from all over the world. Here in Vermont, we only have nine species, so out of all those species of bats, there's only nine species that live here in Vermont. I'll talk more about those in a minute. There are about 43 or 44 species in the United States. Where the heck are all the other ones? South America, the rainforest have got hundreds and hundreds of different species. In fact, the bats in the rainforest, when we humans go in and cut down all those trees in the rainforest, so we can have farm fields and do whatever and we want the wood and all kinds of rationale for why we should cut the rainforest down, the bats are the ones who eat the fruit and fly over those opened areas and their guano contains the seeds to re-seed the rainforest. Not make the rainforest re-seed, but re-seed the rainforest. So they're planting all the seeds, so all the new growth in the rainforest started from bats that were flying across the area. So, let's just do a quick review of some of the things that bats eat because bats eat... I mean, you can't imagine all the things that bats eat. There are approximately 750 different species of bats that eat insects and they eat all kinds of insects. One of the ways they catch insects, they're all those that use echolocation. So they're flying along, they're chasing a bug, they get the echolocation hit on the bug, and now, how do they catch it? Do they fly up and just snag it in their mouth? Well, no, actually, they have this big net with them. It's called a wing and they fly up and when they get right up to the bug, they just take that big net and go, and scoop it into their body. Some species throw it into their tail membrane and then get back to flying and bend down and grab it out of the tail membrane. So it's a very efficient way of catching bugs. But they don't just eat flying insects. They can eat, they glean, they can pick insects off the ground in flight. So they will eat crickets and grasshoppers and this particular species likes these millipedes or centipedes and they are actually, this species is actually able to land on the ground, pick up a bug and then take off again. There are a lot of species that can't do that. Yes, go ahead. They certainly could. They are very efficient insect predators. There was one picture there of a cricket sitting on top of a cactus. Well, that cricket didn't actually just wind up on the cactus. It was put there on the cactus by Merlin Tuttle and his crew trying to get a picture of a bat coming in to pick up a bug. So they put the cricket on the cactus and the bat came in and picked it up off the cactus for them. It was a trained bat, believe it or not. It looked good in the picture, didn't it? Like, wow, look at that. All right. Oh, this is one of my favorite pictures. This guy is able to handle a scorpion without getting stung. So a wide variety of things in the world of insects that bats eat. Then we have about 250 or more species that are Frugivores and they like eating what we would consider to be overripe fruit. They don't like crunchy hard fruit. They like squishy fruit that they can take a bite of, squish all of the juice and the good pulp out of it and then spit the part out they don't like. So they will grab a piece of fruit like this and hang from it or they will grab a piece of fruit, pull it off the vine and take it with them like Figgy Piggy did and then they go to their favorite tree that they are going to hang on while they are eating their fruit. This guy is picking a piece of durafruit up. He will take off with that in his mouth, go find his favorite tree branch to hang on while he is eating that fruit. But notice he is picking the one that is overripe, not the green one, not the one that is rock hard. He wants the one that is easy for him to chew. Do the bats get drunk off of their overripe fruit? Is that a question? Good question. To my knowledge, they are not fermented fruit. They are just at the point of being squishy so they would not be fermented. I do have a group of birds come by every year in the spring and eat all of the cherries that have spent the entire winter and they are fermented and they are all drunk and they all end up splashing in my pool and doing weird stuff. Our frugivores eat all kinds of fruit that they like overripe fruit and we scientists have recently done some studies because fruit farmers said it is the bats that are eating all of our good fruit. So they did a study. They put some tags on bats that they knew were feeding on fruit in the area. Big huge orchards and way over there, five miles away, a whole bunch of wild fruit trees. Where did the bats go? To the orchard? No. They went to the wild. They have been eating wild fruit for the past two million years. They don't care about cultivated fruit so they prove to the farmers, you've got your fruit, the bats aren't touching them, they want the stuff they've been eating forever. So then, we've got nectar eating bats, bats that take their meal from inside of an assortment of flowers. And of course, in doing that, they also are pollinators. So here's a bat coming up to a cactus flower out in the western part of the United States. He's going to stick his head inside that flower to get at the nectar. The nectar is way down here. So he sticks his head in, notice how long his neck is and how long his snout is. It's a perfect fit for those flowers. There, by the way, one of the only pollinators of the agave and saguaro cacti out in the western United States. Who cares about that? Well, if you like tequila, this is what it looks like after a good day of getting nectar from flowers. They are covered in pollen and have spent their night pollinating flowers all across the desert areas of the United States. Totally different method that a semionic relation between a plant and a bat has developed. Here, the nectar is way down here, but the pollen is up here. And when the bat goes in to get the nectar, the pollen comes off on its back. So it goes flower to flower to flower carrying the pollen on its back while it dives into the flower. So these nectar bats have really long tongues, then? They have long necks and pointed snouts. Their tongues are not terribly long because this guy is going to go halfway into that flower. If we have time, one of the problems I have is I get going on these things and we realize after about two and a half hours, it's like, I'm hungry. Let's get out of here. So you've got to be careful about that. But in the event that there's time, I'll pull a video up of one of these guys actually feeding on a flower as it's going. So then we've got seven species that are carnivores, meat eaters. They eat a wide variety of meat. They eat frogs. They eat lizards. They eat snakes. They have very strong jaws and very sharp teeth. If you look closely at that guy's teeth, you can see he's got some serious teeth gone on there. They will catch a frog and they will eat the whole thing. So I have some video if anybody wants some really gory stuff of a bat eating an entire lizard. Then we have a bunch of bats that eat fish. Now you'll wonder to yourself, how the heck does a bat catch a fish? They have little tiny fishing rods, little Orvis. A bat catches a fish the same way it would use echolocation to catch a bug. But it's looking instead for the circles in the water. When a fish comes up and grabs a bug, it makes those ripples. And a bat knows that the middle of those ripples, there's a fish. And it comes flying in with its feet. If you look closely at those feet, very long toes with right-angle toenails that are sharp as a razor. And it drags those in the water as it's flying by and hooks the fish and picks it right up, throws it right into its mouth and goes off to eat it in its favorite fish-eating tree. How in the world did they get that story on? Well, I wondered that myself. I've got another one at the end of this of a bat getting a drink. And I'll tell you the story when we get there. So what's missing? Vampire bats. Vampire bats are real. They just aren't real the way Hollywood has convinced us that vampire bats are real. Vampire bats are tiny. They're about this tall. They don't have big, long fangs. They are stealth. They feed on blood, but that's a chicken. A standard size, this is not Big Bird, it's just a regular size chicken. So there's a chicken and there are two vampire bats. And the vampire bat waits for the chicken to get in the tree and go to sleep. It lands on the branch and sneaks up underneath the tree and underneath the branch and then comes around and it licks the edge of the toenail to soften the skin up. It uses its very sensitive nose to figure out where is the nearest blood vessel. And it makes a tiny little paper cut. Doesn't even wake the chicken up. The chicken doesn't even move. But it makes this little nip and now it just waits. Drop of blood comes out. It licks up the drop of blood and its saliva has an anticoagulant in it. So another drop of blood comes out. And it feeds until it's drained the chicken totally dry of blood and it blows away in the wind. No. A vampire bat will lead about half a thimble full. A thimble for those that don't know is a little tiny cup about this tall. They eat half a thimble full of blood. And so this guy is going to eat his fill, then he's going to take off and his partner there is not going to make another bite. He's just going to move in and continue to lick until he's had his fill. They take off. The next few drops of blood wash away the anticoagulant. The chicken wakes up in the morning. Doesn't even know anything happened. So that's the real story of vampire bats. Don't believe what Graham Stoker tried to convince himself. So here's a picture of a bat. This will really blow your mind. Here's a picture of a bat getting a drink. How in the heck did the photographer end up right there at that exact instant to get that picture? And the answer is he wasn't even there. He had a circle of cameras that all had electronic eyes that tripped the cameras when something came through. So a bat flies across the pond to get a drink and 28 cameras all took pictures of it. And after you do that enough times, one of them must be a bat flying right at the camera, don't you think? That's how this picture was done. And of course when they hit the water, water splashes everywhere. And sometimes when they're getting a drink, if they're getting a drink out of a lake or out of a fast running brook, they get a little too close to the water. And when they hit the water, they end up in the water. So they have to swim over to shore and climb up on something and dry out and then climb a tree and take off. Sometimes you might see, if you're on a farm, you might see those big huge tubs that they fill with water for the livestock. And there's a big heavy piece of rope that goes down into the water. What the heck is that for? Because bats fly across to get a drink and if they end up in the water, they can't get out. But if there's a rope in there, they swim around and climb up the rope and they're gone. How do they swim? What do they use to swim? They have arms just like we do. They're called wings on a bat, but actually they're arms. And so they swim, just paddling along. Say that again. Could they like float with their wings? They probably float very well. And if you just take this picture, here's a bat's thumb. And one, two, three, four fingers. Here's the forearm, elbow, upper arm. This is an arm just like us. Bats being mammals, they have the same body parts we do. So when a bat wants to fly, it just opens up its hand and the hand forms the wing. Which is why all the bats of the world are in the order chiroptera, which means hand wing. Chiroptera. Other questions? Anybody? Okay. So, there's things bats eat. So now, here in Vermont, we only have nine species of bats. I always think that we kind of got cheated. There are 1,463 species. Why don't we have more than nine? Well, the answer is, for the past couple of million years, all the stuff that those bats like to eat is found in the northeast part of the United States. So the species that we have here in Vermont and upper state New York and Maine and Connecticut and Massachusetts, those are all the same species. As we get further south, there are a couple more species that join the crew, but they've been around forever. And years and years and years and years ago, bats lived in bat houses that were huge, old growth trees. We think of big trees as, you know, they're this big around. But 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, big trees were huge. And when they died, they died standing. And they got big holes in them and the bats moved into those big open areas in the trees and they lived inside those huge trees. So I want to talk about the bats of Vermont and let me talk about echolocation first. Is it legal to own bats? It is not legal to own bats or any other wildlife. And at the bats center, we don't own any of the bats, we simply care for them. Most of the bats that we get in come in the fall and early winter when bats are supposed to be going into hibernation and end up inside people's houses. And the weather gets cold, you can't just throw them outside because they'll freeze to death. So they get them to us. We have a facility where we can take care of them for the winter. We have a cave, cave, that we can keep them in where the temperature is the same as it would be in a real cave. It never changes. It's between 55 and 60 degrees all the time. So they go in there and they go to sleep just like they were in a cave or they were in somebody's attic. But echolocation, all of those insectivores use echolocation, which means they make a sound that goes out and bounces off everything. And they learn the difference between the echo coming back to them for a bug, a moth, a mosquito, a bus, a house. I mean they know their environment. So every bat, every species of bat makes a different kind of echo, or different kind of echolocation pulse. So if we were to take this thing, I encourage you to run out and buy one of these. They're only $375. You can get these at Amazon.com. So this is a little device that you plug in. I have one that happens to plug into the series of i things, iPads, iPhones, iPods, i everythings. The current ones, I've had this for many years, but the current ones are all Android and plug into all Android devices. But when you plug them in and download the software, you plug them in like this, you download the software, and this can be used to listen as a bat flies by. And it shows you on the screen, it shows you the pattern. You hear the echoes, and the echoes are different for all these different species. So you hear the echoes, you can set it to listen for the species that would be in Florida or Tennessee or New York or wherever you happen to be. And it will tell you, the bat that just flew by was Eptiscus fluscus, or Myotis lucificus. It'll tell you the species. So you don't even have to look it up anywhere. It just hears that echolocation pattern and it knows the pattern goes with a particular bat species. So here is what echolocation happens to sound like for different species. So this sounds to us like a bunch of chirps. It's actually thousands of pulses going by so fast that to us it sounds like a continuous noise. And this particular set is a Mexican free-tail bat, and that's the way it echolocates to catch its insects. Pardon the echo. This one has a completely different type of echolocation. And you'll see from this how this machine is able to tell which bat is which. If you listen carefully, you can actually hear this bat hunting and then catching a buzz. You'll hear the feeding buzz. Ready? Caught a buzz. So this is one of the species we have here in Vermont. The silver-hair bat. Easy to tell when it catches a buzz. So these recordings will mean just by listening where bats were known to be flying around, turn the recorder on this little device on, and when we turn the bat around, bye. So run right out and buy now. Everybody share. Okay, so this, I'll do more demonstrations of that if anybody is interested. So, now the bats of Vermont. All of our bats are insectivores. We've got nine different species. Here's the kicker. Nine different species and five are on either the threatened or endangered species list. Which means they are in the same classification as peregrine falcons, bald eagles, soft-shelled turtles, all those things that we hear about on the news all the time. But nobody ever talks about the bats and the nine species and the five species that are endangered. So people think, middle of winter, I got a bat, I'm throwing it outside. What if that was one of the endangered species? Can you tell the difference? Well, no. Oh, you probably shouldn't have thrown it out there, though. So, let me talk about the different kinds of insectivores we have in Vermont. And for each of these, if you look here and down here, you'll see these are house bats. This particular species that I'm showing you now, a big brown bat. That's Attiscus fuscus. Can you spell that? So, house bats are bats that live in house-like structures. They live in bat houses, attics, garages. They don't hibernate in those houses necessarily, but they might. You might find a bat in your attic, but he actually hibernates downtown in one of the abandoned buildings for the winter, because they're all winter long and peace and quiet. So, we try to identify both summer and winter. This particular species is a house bat in the summertime. And in the winter, hibernates in house-like structures could be any kind of a building. Or, occasionally, we will find them in caves. This particular guy weighs a half an ounce. It's the most plentiful bat that we have here in Vermont. It used to be that the little brown bat, Myotos lucidicus, was the most plentiful bat in all of North America. And now it's on the endangered species list. More about that in a minute. So, big brown bat, little brown bat. Boy, do they look the same. What's the word, cow-car, calsar? Cow-car. Does that mean? No. In the ear, we have a tragus. On the heel of the bat, we have a cow-car. It's a little cartilage growth that comes out the edge of the wing membrane right at the heel of the bat. And sometimes it's straight. And sometimes it's got a keel on it like a boat. Just a little brrr. A little dip, like the keel on a boat. So, we say these bats have a keel, the cow-car. Now, why do we use things like that? Because in the dark, bat species look very similar. They're brown with slight dark markings. And then you need something more. Is it bigger than my thumb? Oh, could be a big brown bat. Smaller than my thumb? Ooh, could be any one of many species. So, we need something beyond that. So, we look at how long are the hairs on the toe? How does it have a keel and cow-car? So, all those are little things that you see listed under the description that help us identify a particular species. So, this guy is on the endangered species list for a reason. Notice, he's a house bat. In the summertime, he spends his time in houses in buildings of some kind. But look where he goes in the winter. They go into caves. Now, that's not a big deal until 2006. In 2006, a fungus somehow came from Europe to a cave outside of Albany, New York. And the fungus is a cold, damp, loving fungus that likes caves, which happens to be where our cave bats go. So, this fungus decided it was going to grow on the surface of the skin of the bats and it makes them itch. So, they wake up and they scratch and they wiggle around. And then they go back to sleep. And a week later, they wiggle around and go back to sleep because the fungus is irritating them. So, instead of sleeping all winter, they are waking up way, way too often. And they burn up all their fat reserve. And by the time it gets to be February, their body clock says, I'm hungry and thirsty. Must be spring. And out they go, out of the cave into freezing cold weather and freeze to death. Not just one or two. Millions and millions of them were flying out because this fungus made a mitch. One cave, Albany, New York. 2006. 2007. Four caves, two states. 2008. 12 caves, five states. By the time we got up to 2019, across the Mississippi River, and all the way over to Oregon. So, this fungus is now all over the place and affecting all of the cold, dwelling cave bats. Because that's what the fungus like. Yes. Yes. So, any of those where we see winters in caves are in trouble. So, here we go. That's two bats so far. One's endangered, the other is not. Oops. Oh, there we go. A little delay there. Hold on. Hold still. It's coming, it's coming. There we go. The northern small-footed bat. Forest bat, cave bat in the winter. So, that means it's going to be in trouble because it has the same problem as the little brown bat. Well, what does that mean, forest bat? If I put up the bat house on the side of my building, will I ever expect to see an eastern small-footed bat in it? No. Their habitat is in the forest and in the winter time they go to caves to overwinter, which is why they're on the threatened or the endangered species list. So, then we have, so that's two of the three that are on the threatened or endangered list. Here we have the northern long-eared bat. You can tell the difference between a northern long-eared bat and a big brown bat because it has long years. When you look at the two, you'll go, wow, this guy's got really long ears. Noticeably longer. That other one, the small-footed bat, when you look at that compared to one of the others and you look at their feet, you say, wow, this guy's got really tiny feet. That's because it's a small-footed. You had a question? It's also really small-footed. Yes. Definite difference in shape. The tragus in the ear for a northern long-eared bat is like a dagger. It is very long and comes to a very sharp point. Of course, we're talking about something that's only this long, but it comes to a point. So, it's easy to tell when you look at it. This is a northern long-eared, not a little brown, not a big brown, because looking at that tragus, it makes it clear. So, another cave bat. It forests, in the summertime, caves in the winter on the threatened or the endangered species list. Indiana bat. So, the Indiana bat is on the federally endangered species list for exactly the same reason. It's the fact that it's going into caves in the wintertime that are causing the problem. And then, the tricolored bat. Another one that's on the endangered species list. Each one of these got there because it's a cave bat and the fungus got into the cave, and that's the thing that has caused the problem. And then we have the silver hair. Now we're getting into the big, big bats. Huge, huge bats. Here's one. This is a migratory bat. He doesn't mess around in the whole hibernation thing and go into a cave. This goes south. He flies south, but he's three inches tall, weighs two-fifths of an ounce. He's huge. He's called a silver hair because every hair has a silver tip on it. And the red bat. Another one of those, he's a forest bat, but he migrates in the wintertime, head south for the winter. Is that it again? It looks a bit like a rodent. Yeah. And if you saw one, he's not very tall. He's three and a half inches tall, weighs one ounce. So he's not like this big. He's a little tiny thing. And most of the time, he looks like just what you're looking at. He's got a very short face. So he looks really small. He pulls those wings in and he looks really tiny. He looks a lot like a guinea pig, only in miniature size. And this is our granddaddy of Mal. Ways one ounce, biggest bat we have here in Vermont. He's enormous. Another one who forests in the summertime and then migrates south. How far south? They don't just go down to New York. They go to Tennessee, Florida. They go a long way. And they return to exactly the same spot where they left. They know, bats know how to go where they're supposed to be. So those are our nine species. And the reason that those are on the threatened or naming species list is because they are cave bats. So let's talk about white nose fungus. Anybody want to try and pronounce that? The proper name of the fungus is Pseudogena magnicus destructus. We call it PD, much easier. So I'll spare you the details of all of the bats we had in caves. In Haley's cave we had 15,000 bats in 2006, 7,000 in 2007. That's one year half population gone. Fewer than 1,000 in 2008 and now there are virtually none. Last survey there were no bats found. So this is Dorset, Vermont has the largest hibernation area for bats in Vermont. And it's a cave way up at the top of Mount Aeolus. The cave goes straight down and is a perfect location for bats to spend their winter. The fungus of course got in there and the first time the biologists went up, this would be in 2007 winter survey they went up there and they found carcasses of tens of thousands of bats on the ground. Because they had come out, didn't figure out, gee it's still cold we should go back in because their body clock is saying go eat. You're running out of energy, go eat. So they would hang around the opening of the cave and all those little dots that you see are thousands of dead bats all over the ground. Do they know how the fungus spread from cave to cave? Well the big question is how did it get from a cave in Europe to a cave in Albany, New York? That's the big question as yet unanswered. We know how it spread once it got there. That goes into the cave, that gets the spores of the fungus on it. Spores of fungi are incredibly tough to get rid of. So that bat happens to be one who wintered in a cave in Albany but he spent his summers at a house in northern Maine. So he left the cave and went up to Maine with the fungus on. So he carried the fungus, deposited the spores of the fungus in a new cave. Now the cave became infected with the fungus and of course out of the thousands and thousands of bats that were in that first cave they all went somewhere. So it went in a matter of two years from one cave in Albany, New York to the new area in 2008. It has now spread to multiple locations. I'll just click through these and you'll see how rapidly it spread. 2010, 11, 12. And then all of a sudden we zoom back because the next year all the way to the west coast and then we started seeing it on the west coast and in Texas. So anywhere that those bats were spending their winters and coming out and carrying it somewhere else it was just spreading like crazy. And of course back when this was first discovered the big question was with this huge, huge decline in the species a cave that used to have a quarter of a million little brown bats in it now has 15,000. In another couple of years are they going to be extinct in that cave? That was the big question. Because you're waiting outside those caves like the time when they would have to come out and rehabilitate at least some to save the species? That would be a great idea if we could put somebody up on top of that mountain in Dorset on Mount Aeolus. And every time a bat came out they would collect it and bring it up to us. Could we then take... I don't think you could take care of all of them but it is so cute. We do every year the scientists... See here's the deal. You cannot intentionally go and take wildlife. That's against the law. So they could not open the gates to the cave and go into the cave and collect all the bats that were within 50 feet of the entrance. What they can do is if they are outside the cave they can pick them up and bring them to us. So every year we do in fact get them. The problem is it is a 4-hour walk down from the mountain then a 4-hour drive up to us very stressful on bats that are already in serious problem. They are outside the cave, could have been there for days so it's very difficult. It would be great if we could station somebody up there all the time and every time a bat came out we collect it but that just isn't going to work. So it would be great if we could do that. When we get the bats we use betadine, an iodine solution. We use a very dilute betadine solution and put it on their wings and kills the fungus instantly. So we are able to get the fungus off the bats and now they do their part in recovery. I'll show you some pictures of that in just a second. Well, you could. The problem is when they come out they are already stressed. They are... No, in the cave. Well, in the cave, the cave is I think 7 miles long. It's a big huge cave. So trying to put food in there for the bats would not be very practical. Pretty tough to do. And trying to kill the fungus, we can kill fungi. That's the problem. We have antifungal stuff. The problem is every cave has got thousands of different fungi that are all good. It's just the one that is no good. But what we discovered over time, mother nature figures this thing out. Over in Europe, fungus is in the caves, doesn't affect the bats. There are thousands and thousands of bats. Over here, we are beginning to see a slow increase in the population of bats in our caves, very slow, which says they are adapting. One of the observations was in Dorset, the bats have moved deeper into the cave where it's too cold for the fungus. So they are able to make it all the way through the winter without the fungus and then they come out, so they are figuring this out. Without us trying to do anything, it appears as though the bats are doing what mother nature has done for the past thousands and millions of years. So how does the fungus get started in the first place? Well, when a spore comes over here, a fungi travel as spores, a little microscopic, if a climber was spelunking in a cave in Europe and got it on their rope and years later went down into a cave in Albany, New York. Those spores came out of the climbing gear and end up in the cave, perfect environment for the fungus, it starts blossoming, and now it gets on the bats. Are they only in caves or do they get on trees and house walls? Cold, wet environments. So that is cave environment. It also happens to be every rock crevice in our granite faces, every crack, every slag pile from mining operations where they pulled out tons and tons of rock and just piled it all up. They are all filled with the fungus way down inside and it happens. That's where northern long-year bats like to spend their winter. That's where small-footed bats go in the winter because they can burrow way down under these enormous piles and work their way back out in the spring. So in Europe, the reason that it's not affecting bats there is it because those bats over 500,000 years are also in the colder areas or it doesn't affect those particular species or is there something else going on there? We think it's just a matter of... We don't know how long the fungus has been there, but it's suspected it's been there for like a million years. But there's never been a connection between European caves until we humans came along, European caves and North American caves because we're able to make that transition. The bats can't fly that far, so they wouldn't have transmitted. So we think the bats have just evolved. The stronger bats are producing stronger offspring. They're better at feeding. The ones that in our caves that didn't die right off are the ones who did better. They went into hibernation fatter. They picked a better place in the cave. One thing about bats, you can go into a cave and you can put a band on a bat that's hanging on this nub right here and come back the next year. He's hanging on that nub right there. So they have to learn that they should move to a different location. That's how we know that at least one bat has lived to be over 36 years old because it was found in the same cave at the same location for 36 consecutive years, not because it was dead and hanging there, but because it left and came back. So is this just happening in New England? No, this is all over the United States, Canada. It's all of the caves in southern Canada. Bats are found everywhere on this planet except the South Pole and the North Pole. So it's affecting all of the ones... Everywhere that any cave bats are impacted by this? Yes, of course. Well, in South America, the temperatures are warm all the time. The food source is available all the time, so there is no hibernating. There are some species of bats that move from one cave to another. The bats that are in Bracken Cave in Texas move to southern Mexico and then come back. And that's not an easy thing when you're trying to drive your little moving truck and you have 50 million bats that have to move. It's a lot of little trucks driving by. What about really, really southern South America? Like, bottom of Peru, southern? Because it's somewhat... That's a possibility. I'm not right up on these specific species that are down in the southern part of South America. So it's possible. The cave... Once the fungus got here, it spread so fast and anywhere that the environment is one that it likes, it will continue to grow. One of the nice things about it, if a bat survives in the cave, survives the winter and comes out, it's got the fungus on it. But once the temperature gets over 70 degrees as it comes out of hibernation, the fungus can't survive. So the fungus dies off naturally on the bat. But here's the issue. Bats have got this incredible immune system. So this is the effect that white-nose fungus has on a bat. That we got out of Dorset Cave. The people from Fish and Wildlife went up there. They found a bunch of bats out there. They picked them up and brought them to us. So this is a picture when it first came in, April 10th, 2018. If you look closely, you can see on this bat's wings. Right here is my pointer showing up. Right here, you can see a little tight spot right there. A little funny spot on the wing and over here on the other wing, right here. A little tail sign that this bat had the fungus growing on it. So we know this bat was infected. So what's the big deal? Well, bats have got this incredible immune system that can fight off anything. Ebola, SARS, rabies, COVID. They have this incredible immune system. When the fungus gets on them, their immune system goes into high gear. This thing has got to go. It's got things growing into my skin and it starts attacking the fungus. And what happens is it attacks the fungus so violently that it rips its own wings apart. So you see, from April 10th to April 26th, this thing has the wings that just fallen apart. This one almost all the trailing parts of the wings. This bat could never fly in the wild. Had we gotten this bat and gotten a beta dying on it and killed the fungus right away, maybe it wouldn't have gotten this bat. But for the first time ever, in 2018, the Vermont Bat Center said, maybe this bat is capable of healing itself. Let's give it warm, good food, high humidity, 98% humidity in its enclosure. So it's almost raining. So here's the bat on May 9th. And it's saying, hey, I can fix this. And it starts regrowing its own wing tissue and then it's now, on May 30th, it's able to fly. And we released this bat. Unfortunately, we had to release it back where it came from. And we're sitting for a while, right back into the cave. So hopefully that bat came out tougher than it was when it went in. Yes? How does it regrow? Is the wing material almost like skin? The wing material is skin. Bats have solid wings like airplanes, which is why when a bat's on the ground, it's in big trouble. It needs air movement over those wings in order to fly. So on the ground, it's got to be able to climb up on something. There are a few species that are able to jump. They have strong enough legs and arm movement that they can jump enough to get air under their wings. But if you see a bat here in Vermont on the ground, it's a goner unless it can find something to climb up on. So that's when we encourage people to get a cloth and a pair of gloves, scoop the bat up, carry it over to the base of a big tree so it has a chance to climb up. Bats, because I know they spread it, but does it affect them? Would it kill them if given enough time? Yes, it will kill them if given enough time. They are able to fight off the rabies virus for a period of time, but it eventually catches up to them because it's attacking the entire nervous system all at once. And even the bat's immune system can't keep up with that kind of an attack. So a bat that gets rabies may be able to survive for months, but then suddenly it just goes downhill very quickly. That's why we often find bats that have flown along, doing perfectly well all the way through, and here it is July and we find it on the ground and it's flopping around doing weird things. That's one that has rabies and it finally caught up to it so the bat could no longer fight off that infection. So we've always been told that if you wake up in the morning and there's a bat in your room, you need to get rabies vaccines because the bat could have bitten you in the night. Can you comment on that? I certainly can comment on that. If that is the case, you always, always, always in Vermont Dial 1, 800 for rabies and you talk to the people that know and you tell them exactly what your story was and they will tell you. I don't take any, make any attempt at telling people what to do medically. The rule of thumb is if the bat is in your house and is in a room with a sleeping person, then it's possible that you have come in contact. It's not that it bites you, it's that you came in contact with its saliva. The rabies virus is transferred with saliva. So that's crawling around on your arm and happens to crawl over your finger where you had a hangnail. If the saliva gets into the hangnail, now you are infected with a rabies virus. And that's not such a big deal except for the fact that in humans, rabies is terminal. If you don't get treatment, sayonara. I guess that was my question. I was like, wait, there aren't vampire bats in Vermont. But that was the reason. That's the reason. It's the saliva that is the issue. So in the event that you do get bit, you definitely now have a puncture wound, even though no blood, you can't even see where it bit you, that doesn't matter. It got under the epidermis and that's it. You've been infected with whatever the bat had. So that's why if you call the rabies hotline, 1-800-4-RABIES. After you tell them your story, they'll tell you. Yes, there's a chance. Or no, there's not. It was in a different room. It was with your husband. We don't like him. Whatever. Yes. Do you ban all the bats that you rehab? So can you track them to see? Every bat that we have taken in or that Fisher and Wildlife has dealt with have a wing band that says, on this tiny, tiny little wing band, and it says, we're not Fisher and Wildlife and then a big, long number. So we know every single bat that we have ever taken in. We know for a fact that we had a bat which we raised from baby size. And by the way, when you call up and say, we have a baby bat, if it's bigger than the end of your baby finger, it's an adult. Baby bats are this size. So when we get a baby bat in and we hand raise it, it doesn't know any area. So we release it at our location and it gets released with its rabies vaccination. So we know it's not going to get rabies and it has a band on it. So we released a bat. We have a big enclosure where it learns to fly. We listen to the acoustics so we know it's catching bugs. And then we just open the door and when it is ready, it leaves. If it wants to stay, some have stayed for weeks and eventually go somewhere else. But we had one that we put out there and after a couple of weeks, he finally decided he was going to venture outside the door. So we watched him. He ventured outside the door about 10 feet and went right back here. The next day he was feeling much braver. He went out about 30 feet and then went back. And then a couple of days later he just disappeared. And we thought, okay, good for him. We don't have to worry about that guy anymore. October comes along and it starts getting cold. And we go out in the enclosure. The door's been opened all summer. Go out in the enclosure and darn it, he isn't in there. We know it's the same bat because he's got an arm band on and we know which one's which. So we said, okay, you're not being very smart here. We're going to leave you for another week and see what happens. He went sound asleep in the little bat house. We have a bat house out there that's like this. And he just went in there and went to sleep. He said, okay, getting cold enough we better bring him inside. So we brought him inside, made sure he was healthy, checked his weight, put him in our hibernation cave. Next spring, took him outside, put him in the thing. He hung around for a while, eaten our mealworms and then disappeared. In the fall, October gets here. There he is in the bat house. He's there waiting for food and we didn't feed him so he crawled in and went to sleep. So we brought him in another over winter, took him out the next spring. Finally, after three seasons of doing that, he never came back. Now we don't know whether he never made it or got eaten by something, but we're thinking, oh yeah, he finally figured out he can stay in the wild. Back when we first started this, our grandchildren named every bat based on the circumstances where it was found. This particular one was named Willie. Willie Doe or Willie Stan? We had one that was a pair of bats that were found in a church basement in a bucket of nails. How they got in there, I don't know, but they were named Spike and Rusty. If you go on our Facebook page, you'll find all these crazy stories of some really interesting things. One of the things that happens when an animal is infected with rabies is its throat begins to constrict so it can't swallow. So the saliva in its mouth starts building up and that's what you're seeing. It's not foaming because the rabies made it foam. It's foaming because it can't swallow. So it can't take a drink and clean its mouth out. So I've never seen a bat that was foaming at the mouth. So some animals do some animals. Somebody else had a question? See, I told you, we've been here for four hours and you didn't even notice. All right. So that's about white-nose fungus. And our bat species are doing a darn good job of figuring out how to deal with the white-nose fungus. Let me just do a quick thing of our rehab facility. Bats, unlike people who take care of squirrels and rabbits and foxes and deer, bats are tiny. They're little tiny things. They don't require very much space. We have enclosures for them for the wintertime and our enclosures are just little enclosures. We have hundreds of them. So in our hibernation cave, every bat that goes in there has its own little space. It's like a little vacation villa. But this is our facility, a triage area. Those are the enclosures that we have. So we have a triage area where all our meds are kept and every bat that goes in here gets checked for everything under the sun to make sure it's healthy, good weight. If it has any problems at all, we take care of it to deal with it. We work with two different veterinary services for all of our medications that we need or that the bats need. I'm way beyond medication. We have larger enclosures for our little browns that come out of the caves and are not going to go into hibernation again. They're coming out their high humidity, a high temperature. So these enclosures can be covered in plastic, have heating pads inside, turn the heating pads up, blast humidity into them so that they are in there in a possible environment to repair those wings. And by the way, little brown bats and northern long-eared bats, those little tiny species, can fly around in these cages, no problem. They fly around in circles. Students or like residents who are so badly injured somehow that they couldn't be released? Well, the law says if we can't rehabilitate them in 12 months, they must be euthanized. So if we get a bat that comes into us, for years, to allow us to have educational bats, bats that we know are vaccinated against rabies, but they can't be released because they're missing a wing, missing a leg or whatever. And bats are very intelligent and they are very friendly. So bats that we've had for a long period of time, they are just wonderful ambassadors for the world of bats. But the law says 12 months euthanized. The fact that we get in and we know it is never going to be releasable, it's a huge drain on our resources to take care of somebody that after another eight months we're going to have to euthanize anyway. And nobody can come visit us. So all we can do is show you video and the rare case where I happen to be going to some place where I'm bringing a bat that has to be released and I can bring it and those people who want to come watch when I release it. What are your thoughts on this period of time? They rely on us as rehabilitators to follow the law. I mean it's as simple as that. They license us. Now the penalty of course is they revoke our license and since we're the only one in the state now you've got nobody. So let's see. We have an indoor flight area for our little baby bats. Remember baby bats come to us, they're less than an inch tall. They can get hand fed every hour on the hour 24 hours a day until they are up to four grams. That's the weight just over a dime. And once they get to that size now we can change to so we now feed in every three hours and we increase that cycle but it is intense for about three weeks. Then they're full grown. So once they get to be full grown they're feeding them mealworms, teaching them how to self feed then it's easy peasy from there. But they don't know how to fly. So we have an indoor flight area where we can put them in there and it's big enough that they can practice flying around before we take them to the outside. Some questions. How many steps do you have to be in once an hour? Is there a time when they're all born or are they born throughout the day? They're born all different times in the spring. They're all born between June and the first week in July. I think is a good estimate. That's when all the pups are born. So if you have a bat house and there are 30 bats living in a bat house and half of them are females and half of them have babies all of a sudden there's going to be a whole bunch of babies. And they fall out of the bat house onto the ground and you find them if you can get them back into the bat house. That's good. If not then they come to us and we hand raise them from there. And how many people feed them? How many people does it take to feed them? No, how many do you have to feed all these bats? Oh, our staff, our entire staff. Oh, it's huge. Me and my wife. So you don't sleep in June? We are the only two that are licensed to do that. We do have a board of directors, we're at 501c3 and we have a board of directors and the board of directors happen to be the best bat biologist in Vermont. It's in the country. And when we have one year we got 53 bats all from one demolition site all at the same time. So we sent an email out and said, all hands on deck 24 hours, come on down. So when we have an intense operation like that we have a total of 7 people that we can call on. So how do you go about feeding them physically how do you do this? We have little tiny, tiny nipples and a specialized formula that we feed them with. If you can picture the nipple is oh, can't think of it. It's about this long and about a millimeter wide tiny little nipple it's originally designed for very small rabbits and squirrels for rehabbers that deal with those things but they found those were too big and they had to make a smaller size for bats so we have really tiny. It would be the equivalent of a Barbie doll nipple little Barbie dolls play nipples only smaller. How do you not lose those? I don't know. They all get nicely fastened onto a syringe not the kind with the needle just the body of the syringe they slip right over it so the point is just the parts sticking out so there's a bigger base on it than the little nipple I don't think I even have a picture of those. This is our hibernation cave on the left is looking at it from the outside on the right is the cages all lined up every cage if it was one bat coming from one location then there's one bat in the cage some of these cages have five bats in because they all came from the same house somebody was renovating in their attic and they came across a whole bunch of bats that were in there so they came to us all at once so in a given winter we may overwinter 10, 15, 20 or as many as 100 and that was 108 in there at one time so that's the hibernation cave can you have different types of species of bats in the same cave so you might have a little brown one and another type and they get along okay those cave bats when we did the review of the species all those that are cave bats would be found in the same cave so well northern along your small footed and the the little browns the tricolors all can be found in Dorset cave they are not in Dorset cave you might go in and look up at the ceiling of the cave and there's a cluster of 200 little brown bats and then over here there's a cluster of 50 northern along your bats and over here there's a cluster so you wouldn't find a cluster that had 20 other species mixed in that would be a rarity and this is our outdoor flight area where what's our little pups or are severely injured that are recovering we want to make sure they can fly before we send them off they go out here it's 16 by 16 and they can fly around in there their bat houses inside there where they can go and rest we feed them while they're in there and then when we think it's time to go we just open the door they either stay or they go we have a video surveillance system one of the issues with bats if you go into a room that has bats in our enclosures they disappear behind their little claws they hide the minute they hear us coming until they realize we're going to give them food and then they stick their head out so I'll give them a meal but if we really want to know how they're doing we have to be able to see them any time day or night so we have a video surveillance set of cameras that is in various places throughout the triage area so if we get somebody that's come in injured we can watch them and see how they're performing and these are all pictures we already looked at this set with the falling apart wings so we don't need to do those again any questions? yes about the effects of wind farms on bats well that is a curious thing wind farms do the majority of their power generating during the daylight hours and once it gets to be dusk and into the nighttime they produce less than 2% of their power bats are curious so a bat flying around a wind turbine says what the heck is that thing anyway and they fly up and investigate they don't fly up and get hit by the blades that would be ridiculous something with echolocation that can dodge your tennis racket they don't get hit by the blade they fly up and go behind the blade which is an extreme low pressure area and they go behind that blade and instantly their lungs collapse from that low pressure so they die from the collapsed lungs not from getting hit by the blade but of course initially we thought oh my gosh they're getting hit by these blades and getting knocked all over the place well they're not they're dying because they're getting through that low pressure zone that fall into the ground originally we didn't have any idea how many were up there getting killed by these blades because they get eaten so quickly by raccoons and foxes and anything passing by they love to have a little bat snack on their way so what we've realized is if we were to shut down the wind turbines during migration periods when the bats are known to go down these flyways if we just turn them off at dusk there'll be no more mortality because the bats will be flying by they're on their way to somewhere else if they're on their migration path so we just turn them off and turn them back on in the morning and that has been very successful there have been a lot of work done on acoustic things that will discourage the bats from getting close to the wind turbines anytime and that's the newest research that's going on can these things be put on the top of those big huge the cells that are up there powering the wind turbine when you turn those things on the bats don't come anywhere near I don't know the technical part of that but I've seen videos of bats flying over a pond just tons and tons of bats flying over a pond they flick the switch to turn these things on and in 10 seconds no bats turn it off a couple minutes later all the bats are back so they know it works trying to convince the power company that they're only $15,000 chasing a poor one out there oh my gosh well it costs them $45,000 to change the oil and stuff so it's all relative alright bat houses I have some sample bat houses over here the rule of thumb for a bat house creates something with a 3 quarter inch space in it and bats will like it they create something with a 1 quarter inch space or an inch and a half space they won't like it because years ago a bunch of nutty people like me took part in the North American bat house research project where we made thousands of bat houses in every shape, size and configuration and they all got numbers and we all reported which ones did the bats go in at what time of year and that all was sent back to bat conservation international and it was determined clearly that 3 quarter inch spacing is ideal for the majority of the bats in North America so if you take two pieces of plywood and put them together with a piece of pine board along the side and across the top and put a fancy roof on it if you want but leave a 3 quarter inch gap now you have a bat house so this is the simplest kind of bat house if you want to get really fancy you can make a condo that has multiple areas what you need is a screwdriver that can scratch the surface so it's easy for the bats to land on and crawl up inside in the intro you heard that my wife and I started Chiroctora cabin company way way back and we made bat houses and because we were making so darn many we started that project right at the time when this internet thing came along and we heard you can put a store on the internet and people will buy stuff so we said we can do that so we put up a store right before Christmas and the next day we got our first order and we got hundreds over the years thousands we made over 4,000 bat houses and in 2010 we said that's enough but because we got tired of scratching with a screwdriver I just created a table saw that had 12 parallel blades on it that would cut grooves in the plywood so I could take a sheet of plywood and pass it over that thing zip zip zip and have all the grooves cut all the way to the top in no time I took it apart so no one can't have it so some of our bat houses and the styles that's the one we just looked at these bat houses by the way have been with me since so we first started this in 1998 I think we first started dragging two bat houses around and when bats go into the bat house they don't spread out they like their temperature to be between 95 and 100 degrees and here in Vermont if you want 95 and 100 degrees you better paint it black and you better snuggle up with all your buddies to keep warm so these guys are snuggled up this is looking straight up at the bottom of the bat house and there are 80 bats in there all crammed together trying to keep warm but bat houses are not they don't have to be a particular size or color or any it's the gap that's important so this one was designed for a forest bat to be put up in the woods not on the side of your house the ones you put up on your house are for house bats if you want one for the forest bats you gotta make it like a tree big tall thing three quarter inch gaps so they can get in there and then we have big huge ones anybody ever been to Shelburne Farms to the Inn at Shelburne Farms if you walk across the grounds at the Inn at Shelburne Farms way down at the end of the field you'll see this giant bat look at that handsome guy we put up a bat house there that had the largest known colony of little brown bats we were trying to convince the bats to get out of the attic of the inn because for some reason guests at the inn got all upset when the bat ended up in their room and I kept telling them bat in the room, double the price come on so if you look at this picture this is standing on the porch and if you look out across that big huge lawn you can see the fire hydrant in the bat house way in the back almost invisible that has been there I think we're at 15 years now and it started to show its age the new set of bat houses because it has I think the last count was 500 and some bats little brown little brown bats living so did they leave the attic? no they have put up more wire and fencing and sealed up holes the problem is a bat can get through a space you can get the end of your baby finger in so that the facility is four stories tall has been there for like 100,000 years or something and there are more gaps in openings and the thing they didn't realize was those massive chimneys are enclosed in a separate enclosure that goes from the basement all the way out through the roof so if there's one crack in there a bat can get into that crack and has access to the entire building it's like how are you ever going to get them out of there? double the price put a big mesh over the chimney what's that? can you just put a big mesh over the chimney top? it's not the top it's where the roof comes down and surrounds the chimney or where it butts up against the side of the building and after all those years the siding just has to warp a little tiny bit and now there's a little gap where the bat can land and zoop we did a survey down there one time in the summertime people eat out on the porch there's a cupboard porch on the west side of the building people dying out there have a wonderful evening and we were doing a bat counting so we were counting the bats coming out of one of the areas behind the building where one of the chimneys was and right across above the heads of the diners not just one or two there were like 50 bats they never even noticed them because they were silent you can't hear them and it's just poof and they're gone could you put like one of those audio devices that you said repelled back? you could they tried all kinds of things balloons, tinfoil sheets anything they could discourage them styles of bat houses this is a the one that you see there on the left is the shape of the bat house on the right is looking straight up from the bottom of it it's just rough cut pine right off the lumber yard cheap, cheap, cheap and the big thing three quarter inch gaps and you can put up one or two you can go a little wild and put up lots of them and the thing is you put a bat house up that doesn't mean the bats are going to go there that big one at Chilburn Farms there was not a single bat in there for five years the sixth year somebody in the bat group said hey look what I found and there were 300 that year so it's like who knew so you have to be patient sometimes you think you got a great location for a bat house so you put it up, big open area right by the water in off the end of Crown Point Bridge and no bats ever went in why not because it gets wicked wind coming through there all the time and it never got hot even with that nice shingled roof but then you have a big bat house this is in Canoe Creek, Pennsylvania 7,000 bats we now have two of these in Vermont I'm not sure what the population of those houses are but they're just like this one one is in Springfield and the other is in not Springfield, someplace else but then down in Florida at the University of Florida in Gainesville they had a big huge educational building and it burned down and there were thousands of bats living in the attic space that building that we're now displaced so those thousands and thousands of bats had to go somewhere well it happens the alumni built this beautiful stadium for the Gators their football team and behind the seats there were three quarter in spaces and the bats all moved in so now you've got all these bats and the alumni said hey you've got to do something because we can't have these things coming out right in the middle of a game and all the fans are running away so they built a bat house so this is the bat house the first bat house that they built this bat house had 70,000 bats living in it it started falling apart it had so many bats and so much guano and they never expected that so it was not really built to rigorous standards so they built another one so they only got two but they had to make the other one a bat barn because we get the bat house and the bat barn so it didn't take long for both of those to fill up with bats 140,000 bats oh my god so they built another one there are now over 290,000 Mexican free-tail bats living in those bat houses I think they need a bat hotel and these bats these bats go out every night and feed and they consume about 20 tons of bats every night not yet, 20 bucks don't pay attention then down in Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Fish and Wildlife Department took over this old church building abandoned church building many many many years ago they own exactly the land that it's sitting on they own I think one foot around it and that's it where these people are standing is a graveyard so I use this picture because it helps people understand when I say what we have here is a 15 inch well I saw a bat it had a wingspan like this big we saw it fly by and I took a picture of it well here's a picture, I'm standing the bat on the left has just flown over my shoulder these are all little brown bats with an 8 inch wingspan and if you look way up here that's the real size these guys look bigger this is the optical illusion of the shadows and the proximity to me and my camera so some of these look at the shadow on the lower right it's huge things like a bald eagle but they're all little brown so their wingspan is only this big and this particular this is one of my early experiences going into an area that had lots of bats in it what if they all attack you absolutely never attack people ever, not a single documented case ever of a bat attacking a human this facility has 20,000 bats living in it and I stood there while they came out the forage for the night and they were swirling everywhere I mean but never touched me I could feel wings going by but they never touched me they were just an obstacle they were trying to get by me to get out the door we do a program each year up until COVID we do a program down in Shelburne Farms and at the end of the program we go into one of the big barns down there where they have a large colony of bats and we have everybody go in they're all prepared for this they're told to wear hats so you don't get poop in your hair bring a flashlight if you want it's open area and we turn off the flashlights and everybody is very quiet and we turn on our acoustical monitors and we hear a bat bat go by then another you can hear the echo location and then we hear and pretty soon it's a cacophony of noise just bats everywhere turn your flashlights on and they realize they're in a group like this and the bats go it's like now I'm scared when I couldn't see them I didn't know they were going right by my ear so they are masters of flight they don't care about humans they're just an obstacle in a way and these guys are doing their thing they're going out and eating bugs you say they get rabies doesn't rabies usually cause hyperaggression at least in mammals in terrestrial mammals that would be the case in bats they will fly until they can't fly anymore and fall to the ground and if you observe a rabid bat on the ground it is not just flopping trying to fly it's rolling over on its back it's making weird screaming noises it's in extreme pain it's already reached that point where it has its nervous system has started to break down none of its brain functions are working properly it has no control over any of its muscles because its nerves aren't working so they are not aggressive they are just on the ground and they're going to die it's not going to be another hour or two and they're out at that point would it just be kind of to shoot them or something see technically it is not legal for just the average job to go out and kill a wild animal unless it's part of the whole hunting regime so the proper thing to do in that case is to get in touch with the fish and wildlife or us so we can evaluate the situation and make the determination yes this bat needs to be euthanized jump in your car down there in Brattleboro and just make the three and a half hour drive up here so we can euthanize it or since nobody does that or we will tell you a way of humanely euthanizing it and you have our permission to do that the rabbit bat not just the rabbit bat the bat that your cat caught and has its wing ripped off no chance of survival it's still alive it's going to die a horrible death so we had a call today about that somebody had a bat their dogs had caught it wing off both up to date on their rabies vaccinations so there's no danger for the dogs what do we do with it they were in south london dairy so you can jump in your car and drive up here from south london dairy so i can euthanize it or you can euthanize it yourself the best method for euthanizing it is a sharp fatal blow instantaneous it can't be a wham so death has to be a medium sorry this is one of nature's bat houses that is home to a group of indiana bats one of the really endangered species so there we got indiana bats in one of nature's bat houses been there for a long time it's someday going to fall over and fish and wildlife has that bat house i showed you that was a big tall one they have four of those so when and if this tree goes down they have four that they can put up in the area so they don't lose that colony i'm sorry why would they not put that up preemptively we don't like to interfere with a healthy known colony of endangered animals because that's exactly what i asked why don't we just put them up well we really shouldn't be interfering so we're at the ready and if something happens to that tree we can have it up very quickly but in general do you encourage people to put up bat boxes yes not specific situations right especially if you have a known colony of little brown bats living in erratic they're on our threatened species list they've been on the endangered species list we want to provide them with housing in the event that you are going to do renovations in erratic so let's get the bat houses up now so they can discover them and two years from now when you turn the erratic part they'll have some place to go so we always want to be proactive in that way but when mother nature has got things under control it's an iffy thing this is a bat house that was built by Joe Gardner it's been put up down at Kingsland Bay State Park it was actually put up with the huge assistance of Green Mountain Power who sent two line crews and these trucks that picked this thing up they put the poles in the ground they are environmentally friendly poles they are not treated with creosote they're treated with some natural antifungal stuff that will keep them there for years and the idea was let's make one that kind of fits the environment down there a log cabin would be appropriate so so far nobody's moved in then over by Vermont Public Radio got another huge bat house that's over there if you ever go to Vermont Public Radio in the Wellington area Colchester when you're driving in to get there look off to the left you probably wouldn't notice it unless you knew to look there and this is another one the Green Mountain Power provided us with these crews that they're getting to be experts that put bat houses up so they arrived with these things I probably weighs 1,500 pounds so our trucks give us 7,000 pounds each I thought okay so does it have any bats in it? this one has no bats in it either it's one of those things where you can go look underneath and try and find Guano you can shine your light up inside see if there's anybody in there and so far no takers but we do know from our experience down in Shelburne Farms you can go for years with a bat house that's checked on all the time and not have any bats in it all of a sudden there they are so anyway I ran out of slides I have a few hundred more but it's now quarter of eight so if you were supposed to be somewhere at 730 you're late so I'm going to be going from here down to the golf course and releasing our Randolph bat you are welcome to come by the driving range, right? by the driving range, yes a former driving range against? no for your series when you said it will probably try to find the house it will go to the house it doesn't have to try and find it it's just going to go it's going to go fly around realize he's free catch a couple of bug snacks and then over to Harvey's house we have released many bats where we turn them loose and we watch them they go out, they make a couple of circles around to figure out where they are and zoom this one came from Harvey's house this one came from Harvey's house so what were the circumstances? on the floor of their cold room in there I think it was in the barn it came out of hibernation early and I think we got it at the beginning of April maybe I think and Harvey called me up this morning Harvey and I have known each other in our would turn circle for years and he called me up this morning so I just read front porch forum you're going to be down on Randolph that program I'm going to be up in your area at a board meeting so I'm going to miss it okay