 Hello everybody, thank you for joining us. Is that better? Okay, and yes we are here at Fields Pond and we are welcoming Cory Stearns who is a wildlife biologist for the main department of inland fisheries and wildlife and he is here to talk with us about eight different species of bats in Maine and Maine IF&W's research and monitoring effects efforts, excuse me, on what you can do to support the local bat populations. And I would also just like to give a little shameless plug for a few items that we have coming up here at Fields Pond which will be this Saturday. We have our winter fest which is our family friendly fun extravaganza for all things winter that's from 10 to 2. If you are interested we have a travel log freaking adventure so that will be on the 16th. It's also a hybrid program so 6 p.m. We have our winter ecology series continues. We have a birdwalk and tree ID this coming Saturday, right? No, it's later this month, excuse me. We do have our full moon snowshoe like coming up on the 23rd at 5 p.m. So come join us. There's lots of things to do here at Fields Pond. Without further ado, I will hand the microphone to you. All right, how's that sound good? And right here good for standing too? All right, so let's see. So thanks Audubon for hosting me and thanks for everybody in person and listening online. So I'll start out here if the computer will go, which it's not. It's going to go too fast. So yeah, so I'm the small mammal biologist for main inland fisheries and wildlife and my first slide I just wanted to say talk a little bit about what a small mammal biologist does. So I'm the state lead for all small mammals so anything that's small furry is not considered a game species essentially. So that includes monitoring, research, conservation, and development reviews when we have to weigh in on development projects. But there's really just a few species that I deal with on spend most of my time with that's bats, annoyingly caught in tail rabbits which is state endangered species and the northern bog one thing which is a state threatened species. I work statewide out of the Augusta office. So I thought I'd first just talk about that biology and bats kind of around the world because they're a really cool group of animals. They've been on the planet for a long time. They evolved about 50 million years ago. And there's over a thousand species in the world which is the second most of any mammalian group behind only the rodents. And they've spread across the globe. They're in all terrestrial areas in the world really except the real polar region. So they've evolved a lot of different, have a lot of different adaptations, evolved to live in a wide variety of habitats. And they've evolved a wide variety of food choices. So there's a lot of nectar eating bats that have long tongues and lap up nectar from flowers like a hummingbird this and bats that actually can catch fish. There's a whole bunch of fruit bats that have pretty unusual compared to what we have. They're pretty different from what we have here. They have bigger eyes. They're out during the day and they only eat fruit. And there's a few species of vampire bats none of which are anywhere close to me. But the majority that we have in North America and all eight species that we have here in Maine are insectivores like this silver-haired bat. So the moss flies, beetles, anything that's out during the nighttime flying around they'll grab it eat it. So bats are the only truly flying mammals. Flying squirrels really just kind of fall with style. They get to a high point and they glide down. They don't actually have powered flight. Bats come in a variety of sizes. Smallest is a little three-inch bumblebee bat and largest is a six-foot wingspan giant golden crown flying fox. Which is pretty incredible to imagine a six-foot bat flying over your head in the middle of the day. But they're out there in other parts of the world. Largest that we have here is the hoary bat but a foot wingspan. Bats are also unusual in the small mammal world and in that they can have a long lifespan. They can live over 30 years. Most small mammals like your mice or your squirrels or things have very short lifespans. Like two years is a long time for a small mammal. So that's a pretty unusual in that regard. Most species of bat though not all are nocturnal and they use echolocation which I'll talk more about here in a minute to help them navigate through the night. And depending on where you are in the world and what species you're talking about there's bats that hibernate. There's bats that migrate and there's others that are just active year-round. So here in Maine we have five species that hibernate here in the state and three that migrate out of the state for the winter. Bats are also really important for the world's ecosystems. There's over 500 species of flowers that are reliant on bat pollination. Most, a lot of them are cactuses in the agave plant. Bat fruit bats are really important for seed dispersal and insectivorous bats can eat up to half their body weight insects a night. So they're pest control for people eating those biting insects and they also save US farmers about $23 billion a year by reducing crop damage and decreasing pesticide use. And also bat guano in some parts of the world is used as fertilizer. So bat wing is pretty analogous to our arms. Same bone structure. They have humerus. They have a radius and ulna, a wrist and fingers. It's best seen for the people in person. We've got a skeleton over there on the table to look at. But the bat wing essentially is the arm and then they have very long fingers and the fingers really make up the foil of the wing. They have stretched skin from the body that spreads along the arm through each finger and then around to the back legs and tail and that's what makes up the wing. Bats use echolocation, at least the nocturnal bats. They're only among groups of animals is really the bats and then the whales and dolphins that primarily use echolocation. There's a few other species that do as well. But the idea is animal produces a vocalization. It's a sound wave that goes out. It hits an object whether it's a tree or rock or an insect and it bounces back and based on the echo coming back they can tell where that is, how big it is by producing these rapid calls. It can tell which direction those objects are moving. So bats do have eyes they can see. So they're going to a bat trying to fly around in the dark and you know if a forested system where there's not you know the moon's kind of covered up can't see very well so they're going to rely on echolocation. But a bat out in the wide open area on a moon let night might not use echolocation as much might fly by sight. They do have a variety of vocalizations some we can hear they've got some social calls and some pieces and things that we can hear but the echolocation calls are at a frequency that we can't hear it's too high high a pitch for us. So as they're just flying around echolocating usually it's just a steady pulse rate but as they start approaching an object they increase the rate they're vocalizing and that gives them more and more information and that's particularly important when they're trying to catch a food item they can produce hundreds of vocalizations per second when they're zeroing in on a something to grab. So bats are auditoriously difficult to research you know at night is a big part of that and we're kind of day creatures so it gets us off our cycle and unlike the you know nocturnal birds like owls that can they produce a loud vocalization that our ears can hear and interpret bats bats don't so we don't hear we can't recognize their calls whereas if we come out here now maybe we can hear owl hooting we can say that's the great one owl or that's more than solid owl that's not possible for bats and also bats are not really you can't really trap them they're not attracted to any sort of bait you kind of have to just set up a big net if you want to catch them and hope they fly in and since they're flying around they're up in the air they're not down low most of the time so it's hard to get our hands on them so they're very difficult to study so but because they're echolocating frequently they're producing a lot of sound waves so we can record those with an ultrasonic recorder I put an example on the table here kind of a game camera sized unit it has a microphone that is attached it gets extended about 10 feet in the air records all the bats that are passing by using echolocation and then after an extended period we go pick it up bring it back in plug the sd car into the computer and run it through a computer program and it will tell us what species of bats pass by and how many passes so to speak of the of each species they were so in summer 23 I think it was in July I actually had a did a survey here that field spawn set out one of the detectors for two weeks or so came back and this is this is the results on this table but we had five species out here including the tricolor bat which is a rare species state threatened species so main has eight species of bats four are on the main state endangered species list two is endangered to is threatened and the other four are considered species of special concern the little brown bat was historically the most numerous bat in main occurred statewide very abundant they were everywhere but then in 2010 a fungal pathogen that I will talk more about here in a minute came through and wiped out 95 percent of their population so they are now on the main state endangered species list the eastern small footed bat is also affected by the pathogen they weren't they're currently a state threatened species one of our rarest bat what's interesting interesting about the small footed bat is in summer they roost in cliffs rock ledges things like that so they kind of find a crack in rocks and then they wiggle in there and that's where they roost during the summer have their pops in those sorts of avatars northern long-eared bat is both state and federally endangered tricolor bat state threatened and has been proposed as federally endangered as well the tricolor bat got its name because if you look at its hairs there's three different shades of hair color on them and for species that are relatively common in main still considered species of special concern silver-haired eastern red big brown and hoary bat interesting fact about the hoary bat is that the Hawaiian hoary bat is the only mammal native to Hawaii everything else has been introduced accidentally or on purpose so among the eight bats we can group them into two groups one's a tree bats three species the hoary silver-haired in red these species don't hibernate they're migratory they leave name in the winter they roost in rare they're young in the tree foliage so up in the leaves they tend to be solitary these are more common species generally living six seven years and they have two or three pups per year on average and we have five species of cave bats that's the little one big brown small-footed northern and tricolors these hibernate right here in Maine in summer they're roosting in tree cavities rocky areas for the small footeds under loose bark and sometimes in buildings that's the little brown and big browns uh these species are not migratory but they have been documented to go as far as 150 miles from where they summer and where they hibernate they have low reproductive rates generally just one pup per year but they're long-lived and these tend to be our rarer species because they are affected by pathogen so sometimes bats group together and they're hibernating um these are cave bats so they're typically in caves old mines that sort of thing sometimes they group together sometimes they're by theirself within the cave so Maine has generally doesn't have that very many caves so we don't have very many what are called hibernaculas so that's where bats hibernate in the winter um so only four known in Maine we monitor three regularly um historically prior to 2010 there are over 300 bats usually per year um when you combine them all together about 80 of those are little brown bats 20 northern long-eared so occasionally we get some of the others but white nose syndrome uh bungle pathogen hit in 2010 uh got its name from the white growth around the nose of the affected bats um it really affects uh infects the any exposed skin so it attacks the around the nose and also the wings of that so it can and they can be flesh eating each right through the skin membranes of the wings though they some bats do survive white nose um and I'm sure this would be hard you know be hard for a bat to fly around to that sense of damage to its wings um but the main source of mortality is really um they're really small animals they don't have much for fat reserves um and the fungus causes them to wake up more and to just groom themselves to get rid of the fungus so they deplete those fat reserves and ultimately um starve to death or fly out out of their hibernate in winter and working for food and don't find it um dive exposure or whatever else so uh it it's caused by a fungus um typically just referred to as pd because nobody can pronounce scientific name but yeah it's a fungus that originated in europe bats there evolved with the fungus so it doesn't affect the bats there it was accidentally introduced through the united states and was found in new york in 2006 um and has been spreading ever since so here and yeah you can see in the chart here 2008-2009 between the three hibernate we're talking 450 a little over 500 bats and then they're just tanked to single digits very very quickly um but um our current protocol is to survey our hibernacula once every three years uh 2023 was a survey year um so it was end of february early march we visited the visited them and it's still only 35-ish bats but it was technically the highest count we've had since 2011 so that's a little bit of encouragement but um something to note about white nose is again it doesn't affect the tree bats because they're not hibernating so those species were not affected by this pathogen so here's kind of the map this is an old map now um but yeah it's been spreading across from the east to the west um it's most most places in the uh US at this point so um generally bat habitat in summer is considered not to be really limiting here in Maine they live in trees and there's lots and lots of trees in Maine but where they hibernate is kind of limiting there's not many hibernacula as I just said um so there's is a very important habitat for um our bat ecology here in Maine so we try to um protect our hibernacula as much as we can so we try to limit human entry into those um we put up signage saying stay out is a bad hibernaculum and in one case we have put up a gate to physically block people from getting in so there's kind of a great greats that are spaced large enough the bats can fly in and out as much as they want but people are prevented from getting in but um another aspect is as I noticed noted earlier there were only really four or five hundred bats in our hibernacula that we knew about and there were certainly much more than five hundred bats pre-white nose syndrome in Maine and we didn't know where they were hibernated so we worked with uh University of Maine uh grad student Chris Helica and Dr. Eric Blumberg to study what we call non-traditional hibernacula um the study kind of came about is when white nose hit in 2010 Katie and National Park staff started finding dead bats on the landscape in the winter far from any known cave so it got us interested in poking around to find out where they were actually hibernating and in other states they have previously documented bats hiding in rocky crevices so we initiated this study to further investigate that in Maine so Chris went out and put out a bunch of acoustic detectors um on the wind landscape in winter in these talus slopes so generally large piles of rock under under cliff faces and sure enough you did find that four of our species were hibernating in um talus slopes so he was not able to find tricolored bats but um big browns little browns small footed and northern long eards were all documented in various locations in talus slopes and they also found that the generally the larger more open meaning less trees slopes were more likely to be occupied so this is kind of a map a rough map of kind of cliff talus features in Maine so it's much more extensive than the four hibernacular that we know about so this is not that there's bats hibernating in all these areas but um probably much more potential of bats hibernating in talus than there is in natural caves in Maine and that's very different than other parts of the country where there are large caves or old mines where there can be 100 000 bats in one cave so so uh in Maine we do have a we do a lot of population monitoring using the acoustic equipment um I mentioned earlier historically we didn't have a lot of information on the status of our bat populations um we just kind of knew they were around and they seemed to be abundant so that was good enough at the time until there were no more bats around so we've been really amping up our population monitoring since then primarily through acoustics the there is the north american bat monitoring program which is a an effort overseen by the us geological survey and primarily with us fish and wildlife service and a lot of other partners involve as well and they've put forward um kind of standardized protocols and they act kind of as a depository for bat monitoring data across the continent so people go out and do surveys and then they submit their data to this effort um so then proactively other researchers can look at that data and analyze trends in the bat populations of the um state regional and continental scales um so when we first got into acoustic monitoring we really adhered to the the NA bat methodology for a couple years and then we veered a little bit into focusing on driving surveys so most of the surveys we do are just setting those detectors up in the woods in the field on wetlands those sorts of thing and leaving them there so we call those station area surveys and they're great at finding what bats are in are in an area because sooner or later every bat's going to fly by there at least every species should fly by that um detector and get recorded but they're not very good at telling you how many bats there are because you can have one bat just flying around the microphone hundreds of times um and it looks like a lot of bats but there's really just one individual who likes that one little area right by the microphone so but so we also do the driving surveys are better at telling you how many bats there are because you're driving down the road 20 miles per hour which is faster than the bat typically flies so each recording should be a different bat so they're very good at detecting trends in abundance but they're not good at doing that for rare species so if you have a very rare species like an eastern small-footed bat it's very rare on the landscape your trajectory of driving the vehicle and the bats trajectory have to line up exactly at the right time to be able to record it so we've never found an eastern small-footed bat on a driving survey so that's what we kind of have to use both methodologies to really see what's going on in the bat population so we did driving surveys primarily for a couple years and then we switched to doing primarily stationary surveys for a few years and the real goal collectively was to get a better understanding on the distribution and relative abundance of our bats monitor core scale population trends and ultimately design a long-term monitoring plan which is where we are now and we launched it in 2022 so for long-term monitoring we're looking at occupancy during the maternity season so that's in summer when the breeding in occupancy is essentially the percentage of sites that have each species so maybe one species has 50 is that 50% of sites one maybe one's at 30% of sites and so forth so our goal is to monitor 350 sites split over two years so one set of 175 even years a different set of 175 and odd years can repeat those sites through time so that if we start at 50% occupancy for one species and it goes up to 70 we know we're doing well it goes down to 30 we know it's not doing so well that will give us a pretty good understanding on how our bat populations do but we're going to do additional sites as time allows at least the protocol for now is to go with 14 consecutive nights and we'll supplement with mobile surveys as time allows so since we're splitting between even in odd years we've now just done one full cycle between 2022 and 23 and we'll start a new cycle really the first repeated cycle this coming summer so in 2023 I was able to get data from 256 sites getting some sites contributed by our partners at Maine DOT and the National Wildlife Refuge System and Baxter State Park also had a couple of my detectors and their staff were running those but using the computer software we were able to identify nearly 260,000 bat recordings from summer of 2023 and what is pretty typical for us about 80-85% of those recordings are attributed to one of three species so those are pretty clearly our three most abundant species on the main landscape so silver-haired bat big brown bat and quarry bat but there still seems to be good chunk of little brown bats out there some red bats but probably colored northern long years and small-footed collectively those three species combined for only about 1% of all our recordings so those are very rare on the main landscape so all those little red dots on the main map there where we surveyed this year called 2023 pink squiggles are the 14 mobile routes that we're able to complete as well so we've been working with bat researchers at Virginia Tech namely Jesse Dole Cruz and Dr. Mark Ford they've been helping us develop our methodologies and have also been doing some occupancy modeling for us so essentially that's taking our records of where we find the bats and where we don't find the bats and matching it with some remotely sense data to try to explain why we're finding bats in one spot not in another spot so some of the outputs are these these graphs so this is for little brown bats and it kind of shows some of the habitat relationships that we we see so little brown bats at the chances of detecting little brown bat for example decrease as the amount of deciduous forests in the area increases or conversely the chances of finding little brown bat increase as a percent of open water increases so and another part of their analysis is once they've kind of identified the habitat relationships they can kind of flip it and project where the bats are likely to be on the main landscape so this is it's occupancy probability maps so what is the likelihood of that species being in any particular spot on the main landscape the blues being unlikely to be occupied by that species the reds being very likely to be occupied so it shows that our tree bats are doing quite well hoary bats are basically everywhere it's pretty rare to set for us to set out the detector and not get a hoary bat silver-haired bats doing very well in the northern half of the state we don't find them as much on the southern part or coastal areas but they are still present in some spots and red bat is also statewide just not as common as the hoary bats so part of their analysis also includes year as a variable and that has come out as significant for silver-haired and eastern red bats suggesting that those two species are increasing since we started monitoring in 2015 so that's a good thing so kind of there's kind of a dichotomy with our cave bats big brown bats very common still in the southern half of the state we don't find them in the big woods in the north northwest parts of the state very much that species was affected by white nose syndrome but not nowhere near to the degree degree that our little browns are the other species where seems to be more of like a 30% decline but again the modeling suggests that big browns are also increasing little browns despite dropping 95% of their population still seem to be pretty much statewide we don't find them quite as much in very southern Maine but they still have a very high there still out in the majority of Maine's landscape I think class in 2023 about 70% of all our surveys detected little brown bats they're just at a much much lower population density than what they used to but the modeling also is suggesting that that species is increasing so we're perhaps seeing the start of recovery from white nose syndrome for them but then we have three other three rare species with lots of blue you can see a couple little reddish spots in places for those three species small footed northern and tricolors but they are not doing very well very rare on the main landscape and statistically there was not a significant decline in northern or tricolors but those two species do seem to still be declining somewhat so also since it's on this slide we just listed tricolored bats as a state threatened species in 2023 so that's a new addition for us all right so what you can do for bats so the primary thing for helping bats is avoiding disturbance they're roosting and raising the young in the summer so if you can avoid cutting a tree that has bats in it May 15th August 15th and it's best to avoid it at that time you can conserve habitat snags so standing dead trees are really important they a lot of the bats will roost in those and community science we've got a bat roost reporting page on our website that you can report any colonies that you know about through that probably most importantly is to just avoid caves in winter that's really need to conserve their energy and every time they get stirred by someone or something going into the caves it causes them to wake up and burn those precious calories so bat houses they're they can help on bat populations in some certain some circumstances they see there is some conflicting information about you know recommendations where to put them on the on the internet if you're searching around but seems like they prefer houses on buildings rather than on poles or trees they should be put in places where they get a lot of sun at least six hours per day there is some risk of putting them out in complete sun of them getting overheated and which has caused some mortalities of bats in the boxes before they tend to get used more if they're 20 to 10 to 20 feet off the ground that's more where bats are flying around typically so easier for them to get in there needs to be clear vegetation below because they're going to swoop down and then up to get to get into the box bigger is generally better there's multi chamber kind of different rooms in the boxes of sun boxes those are the preferred boxes because there's going to be different temperatures within the box structure so the bats can search around for the temperature they're really looking for and more boxes tend to get used tends to be that seems to be better so it does bats are pretty loyal to their roof sites so it can take a long time for them to find and start using a box then generally they're going to be use it there for a while thereafter but there seems to be some evidence that if you put multiple boxes up they're more likely to start using your boxes rather than just one single box so that we have a bat trunk the department has a bat trunk that our information and education group overseas I brought it people can poke through that came in person but it's got books and videos and some activities a couple of mounts really designed for educators to loan out and bring into the classroom to talk bats to kids so be signed out by contacting Laura Craver Rogers in our August office usually when I do a talk about bats I ask her if it's available she says no it's assigned out but it was available today so I brought it so yeah trying to get it in October this just it's not going to happen so people are thinking of bats on the brain then so occasionally bats do cause problems getting into getting into buildings so generally if one gets into a living space we just closing all your interior doors open the exterior doors windows and it will get out on its own they do sometimes in summer and even in the winter like to get into the attics or crawl spaces to roost or hibernate and the best way to get them out is to do an exclusion which is where you put in a one-way door so the bats go out but they can't get back in but we don't want you to be doing that in winter when they should be hibernating and it's cold outside so because they do occasionally wake up from hibernation and fly out to stretch their wings get maybe get a drink of water and they go back into hibernation mode so if you exclude them then they're out in the winter and they're going to die so we don't want you doing it then and we don't want you doing it in summer when there could be babies in the attic that would get orphaned and die so we restrict it to mid-august to mid-october there's a small window in the spring too and the idea is to get all the bats out and you plug up all the holes in the house and then it should be good to go no more bats and the department does have what we call animal damage control agents that don't work for us but they have to get licensed through us to work with nuisance wildlife there's a list of them on our website some of them no not certainly not all do bad exclusions so they're good people to hire if anybody ever had a bat issue they had to deal with so bats do occasionally get found on the ground you know they you know might be out in the night flying around get too tired can't make a back and they just land on the ground or they're sick or something going on so usually the best thing to do is just leave them leave them alone or you could try to get them up into a more elevated area so that's better easier for them to take off and fly off that next night but bats do carry rabies so they should never be handled with bare hands ideally not at all but it's pretty rare that bats have rabies but it isn't something you need to be aware of so about eight per year test positive here in Maine it's only about four percent of what does get tested but they only get tested if there's some sort of exposure so somebody finds their dog with a bat and it's about if it's going to get tested or if it bites somebody or is in a room where you don't know if it bit somebody or not so so it's kind of a the bats get tested are really more at risk than the natural wild population which probably only has a one percent or so rabies positive rate so we do have four licensed rehabilitators in Maine that take bats so they're always good sources of information if you found a sick or injured bat and those are the people we direct you to if you had a bat that needed to go get rehabilitated somewhere so Center for Wildlife in York Saco River in Limington this fits in Auburn in Acadia Wildlife Center in Bar Harbor no that's all I have I also have some questions yeah yeah you usually best tend to avoid the light areas because it eliminates them and they are they do get predated by owls so if they're out where they can be seeing owls can swoop in and grab them so they might not it's good for the it tracks the insects but probably not so good for the bats I would think but yeah right yeah most people oh yeah good idea yeah so the question would be was if they're up in the attic are they concerned of people do they bite people so generally if they're up in the attic most of the time people don't even know they're there so that but yeah there can be some disease there are disease concerns of their guano and things like that so it is usually best to get them out of any houses that are occupied but usually that they're not you know flying around seeking out people at all they're not interested in coming close to people people are potential predators in their minds so they're not going to come close so but yeah yeah yeah so the question was if there is any concern about decreases in insect populations I haven't heard that come up in the bat world yet but I'm sure there's probably in places documented declines in insects but I haven't heard it come up yet in terms of bat populations but yeah so tricholors are seem to be heavily affected by the white nose syndrome too so they are they are considered a cave bat they were some caves we've only found them in our caves a couple times so we don't really have a good handle where that that species is hibernating name but you got some questions all right why are bat populations significantly lower along the coast do you think long coast scam back no it's kind of species specific though some species are are more common along the coast the red bats tend to be more common small-footed bats tend to be more common in the coastal areas not necessarily right on the coast um yeah so I guess I don't don't have a good good answer for that but so some some of our species is small-footed and the northern long year seem to be associated with steeper slopes so more mountainous areas so not as many of those regions right on on the coast so there's certainly some but another question from online is there any way to control so there's been there's some ongoing research looking at ways to control it using UV light there's some research on a vaccine type thing there's some research on manipulating the the hibernacular themselves so um there's some indication that the surviving bats tend to be in the colder areas of the cave so there's been some tests on trying to cool down the hibernacular to see if that helps survival so currently is the it's all kind of in the research phase and isn't in widespread use at this point but um hopefully um be a wider wider use of those those tools like at some point but do you know if there is a phone app for IDing bat calls kind of like how merlin has the bird calls yeah so the limitation is that you need a specific ultrasonic recorder to be able to detect them so there is I was called an echo meter that you can buy through wildlife acoustics which is a company and it can plug right into your phone and there's a free downloadable app that will identify any bats that fly by as you as you walk around with your the smartphone outside so it's using essentially using the microphone on your smartphone plus the ultrasonic piece that plugs into the usb port so that does happen we the department has bought a few in the past there's an old version in the area but yeah so it's usually it's a few hundred bucks I think to buy one of those devices um but yeah yeah so the question was is nanny's study going on um about how climate change will affect bats not currently in main I would guess somebody's looking at it somewhere but um I don't know specifically but yeah chances are yeah yeah yeah I'm pretty sure they would nice nice tasty big moth so yeah yeah yeah right yeah I don't know it for sure but I would guess but I don't know yep so yeah most of the time you're not going to be able to unless it's right in your hand which it shouldn't happen but also yeah the quick for those online the question was how do I identify the bats so I'll flip back here so uh so the tree bats are pretty easy to identify silver haired bat um it's kind of a black face then silverish black for uh I guess slightly resembles the hori bat but the hori has kind of a yellow chin to it so that kind of differentiates those species the red bat it's kind of unlike anything that anything else kind of the orangish face and a little bit different for on the back but big browns can be pretty easily confused with some of the rare species kind of a brownish glossy fur they do tend to be a little bit bit they are bigger than the little brown bats that's kind of main differentiating feature there um but um with uh oh yeah it's a good question so big browns might have a 10 inch room span little browns eight or nine something like that that's off the top of my head I'm probably botching that but um so it's not a huge difference body length is a little considerably different I think but um so small footeds are smallest bats um they've got a pretty prominent black mask on their face so that kind of sticks out for them um the northern long eards another brown bat but they have their ears are long enough that if you fold them forward they go past the nose so that's the differentiating feature for them um and tricolor bats I talked about the fur earlier they also have kind of pinkish forearms um so that would differentiate that species but they're very unlikely to see anything other than the little brown or the big brown bat so yep yeah yeah is the fungus is driving that yeah just the fun well I'm the generally loss of habitat is going to impact everything but it's minor yeah they they they cover you know several mile area the home range is several miles so if one patch of forest is clear but if it's a forestry operation is clear cut they'd probably lose you know whatever trees they're using that immediate area they just shift over but they do they'll for they forage out in open areas so they'll often come out into clear cut areas to forage and so it's a little bit of uh you know if they if they lose their roost tree it displaces in a little bit but um doesn't the number of potential roost trees doesn't seem to be limiting so yeah they the little browns have been documented going 150 up to 150 miles between summer and winter oh yeah yeah yeah so yeah all these species are pretty wide ranging still yeah so the question was using modus towers so we haven't been marking any bats within IF&W but there are other researchers in North America that are putting modus tags on so they are getting picked up in in places on those towers so there is a chance that you'd get a bat coming through at some point yep keep the dead trees up is really the best thing for them obviously you don't want to you know dead tree fall on the house but otherwise out beyond that that is a really valuable habitat component for them so right the bugs uh probably not those are on either yeah yeah so they probably don't so something yeah something I didn't mention earlier is um northern the northern long-eared bat's pretty um a species that's really forced material so it's flying in you know the thicker force and it will fly and pick insects off from trees too it's considered it's sort of greener so it's not just grabbing them that they're flying around but it can spot them on leaves and grab them which is yeah it takes it probably too small and either they're on animals already or they're down in the you know in the grass just the well bats aren't flying through there so yeah yeah right so yeah it's probably cavers so there's a group of people that like to uh go into caves and investigate so they probably the theory is that someone went to europe and then didn't clean their equipment when they came back and introduced it interestingly I recently did some caves um just a summer and they were asking about where they had been before you entered the cave right yeah yes yeah so yeah there's a pretty thorough protocol ways for deep decontamination that should be followed if you go into any caves to prevent any further spread of it so we got some questions over here too are you finding significant bat mortality from wind towers yep so there's wind towers do occasionally kill bats uh the tree bats uh these these guys tend to be the ones that are most often killed so because they're migratory they're flying and to fly and to be high fly a little higher probably than our cave bats and so um yeah they do get to fly into turbines once in a while so Linda asks is it possible that the talus piles segregate the bats and they help to prevent white nose yeah so it's a good question um so I would guess we don't because there are such piles of rock that the openings are so small people can't get in there to test whether the fungus is down where the bats are so in the talus the bats are probably crawling down deep enough so they get down to a cave-like environment where it's warmer than that environment outside so it's probably a place that the fungus is still living but we don't know that because we can't really get in there to test that um but uh the fact that there's probably more of those areas around the state than just the caves probably does spread out the the risk a little bit um but um and putting bat houses on your house instead of a tree or pole does that increase the chances of them coming into your house or yeah so bats are probably just around and they're kind of looking for places to get into some points so if there's an opportunity to get into a house they'll probably take that opportunity um if there's a house on the side it might help draw draw them to the house might keep them out of the attic but it's kind of hard hard to tell but can they do people's slow windmills to uh make it safer for bats yes yep and that's a good point so um our primary means of um addressing bat concerns with uh wind facilities is the use of curtailment so that's limiting when the turbines can spin so in the summer when bats are active um the turbines can only kick in at a kick in at a higher speed so right now they can essentially spin anytime because bats are not out and active but in summer the wind speed has to be high enough um before the before the turbines are allowed to kick in start generating so for for some yeah so it's kind of dependent on which wind facility what the speed is but um um which goes in as a variety of factors that influence that but um yeah so we definitely are limiting when turbines can spin based on when bats are likely to be in the area the low wind speeds in summer the turbines spin less often than they do now when bats are not on the landscape and we work that work on that through the um permitting process when there's a new wind facility in development question uh which one of the names bats is your favorite oh that's a good question huh no no maybe the red bat because they're just so different and colorful but rather than this the drab gray they're just this nice bright color but cool well thank you very much