 Welcome welcome welcome we have a big crowd today I'm excited for this. One thing I like to say to folks is if you are able chat where you are zooming from. I am in Cumberland, Maine. That's not to everybody there we go let me try again Cumberland. Let me spell it correctly. Rough start for me there we go standish. Welcome everybody we're going to give it a few minutes to get started. Reiki welcome students of Reiki. Dayton Ohio in the house, Vassalboro students in the house. Oh my can't even keep up with it my eyes hurt from following this. Livermore, Limerick, Cape Elizabeth, Richmond VA, Brunswick. Freeport I love it. Climate Action Team Bangor. Dr. Lear is joining us from Colorado, cold and snowy you said. Almost about to snow. Yeah, I was going to say to the Dayton person I was born in Dayton, Ohio. Right, right on. Friendship Maine Fairfax Vermont cool welcome welcome we'll give it another couple minutes. We know we had a bunch of folks want to make sure everyone gets the right link to join steamboat springs at six inches of snow. We're going to talk a little bit about Maine. Hey care, Bassett Valley. Maynard mass. Welcome. So we're going to give another few minutes this is Nick Lund from Maine Audubon I'm joined by Melanie Stern from natural resources Council of Maine. And of course, Dr. Lear from BCI bat conservation international. Nice and hot here in Cali you're just rubbing it in. Hi, everyone from Brunswick. Hello, we'll be there or get started in just a few minutes people are still trickling in and I know we have a bunch of students. Hello students. If you're watching Naples Maine home of TPS top dog. All right, we'll give it. I see 1202 let's give it to 1203 still numbers are still ticking up. We'll get in green. Is that a town or you just the color green Maine Augusta in the house. Must be green Maine. You want to say your favorite color to that's cool I'm interested in that temple town USA wow top some 80 degrees and Sebastian Florida wonderful news that is so great it is about 50 ish in Maine right now I'd say a green main says Amanda. It's in the 50s. Tomorrow's gonna be hot. This is one of the few times where the weekend is actually nice. You know those weeks where it's like beautiful all week and then just raining all weekend. The worst. 1203 Washington Maine just counted 35 bats flying out of our bat house at 830 wonderful news. You are the right audience. All right, well I see 1203 so unless there are objections from anybody I'm going to get started we have a good crowd today and it's growing as we go but welcome to this webinar welcome to endangered species day. Welcome to the end of bat week. Welcome to Friday, perhaps most importantly, but welcome to this webinar. I am Nick Lund from Maine Audubon or advocacy and outreach manager. I am joined by my friend and partner Melanie stern. The forest and wildlife manager at director for some wildlife director apologize at natural resource council main hello Melanie. Everybody thanks for joining. Good to have you and we are excited very excited to be joined by our speaker today and I'm just going to go ahead and dive right into it. Without further ado because we're all here to listen to her and not to me. So let's do it. We are honored to wrap up bat week with a presentation from an amazing scientist working to protect bats in North America. Dr Kristen leer is the agave restoration program manager for bat conservation international where she leads the organizations by national agave restoration initiative to restore and enhance habitat for endangered pollinating bats and support community neighborhoods in the US Southwest and in Mexico. Whoa. She holds a PhD from the University of Georgia. She is a national geographic explorer, and even has her own red bubble for bats swag which I'm putting in the chat right now a red bubble for bats swag is the coolest shirt that you've ever seen shirts plural. Go ahead and click that red bubble. I am. You can find her online. She's at Twitter at at bats for life. And, and I'm pleased to welcome Dr Kristen leer welcome. Thank you, everyone. I'm super excited to be here today to talk about bats. Bats are my passion bat conservation has been my dream since I was very little. I got my unofficial start in bat conservation when I was 12, and built bat houses for my girl scout silver award project. So, yeah, I'm very excited to be here today to share a little bit bats one on one. This is one of some of the really cool things that we get from bats the benefits of bats. Of course touch on some of the threats to bats since this is endangered species day and we're talking about, you know, conservation issues. And then I love to always end on a positive note so we will also be talking a little bit at the end about what we all can do to help bats, no matter where we live or where we are so I'm going to go ahead and get started sharing my screen. Okay, here we go. So welcome to the amazing world of bats. Like Nick said I am Dr Kristen leer I work at bat conservation international. There's my Twitter and Instagram. If you're interested in following and will also share BC is Instagram and Twitter and Facebook later in the presentation. So the importance of bats I always like to start with why, why do we need bats why would we want to have bats around. And before we get dive into that I want to give a very brief overview of bats in general. So there are currently over 1400 known species of bats all around the world. And I just pulled some of these pictures because you can see the amazing diversity of bats that exist in the world. We have something from the hunter and white bats up here that look like little cotton balls. We have the affectionately called the Yoda bat in the right middle that looks kind of like Yoda from Star Wars. We have this badger bat in the middle that looks black and white kind of like a badger. We have carnivorous bats like this one down here with the big teeth that hunt other animals like birds and other bats. And just all of these, all of these bats just illustrate the amazing diversity that exists. And bats make up 20% of all mammal species in the world. So that's our mammals bats are not birds. And bats have fur, they give birth to you know live baby they feed milk to their baby just like you know your cat or your dog does just like we do. And they are the only mammal that can fly. So flying squirrels who may have heard of flying squirrels cannot actually fly they just glide so bats really have that claim to fame. They're also not rodents. They're not you know flying rats or you know mice with wings. They're actually more closely related evolutionarily to people than they are to rodents, which is kind of mind blowing but really interesting. And this map shows that bats really are on all continents, they're found everywhere in the world except Antarctica so everywhere except down here. There's even five bat species that are found in Alaska where it's really cold. There's bats in Siberia and Australia, they are found on every continent and they're pretty much anywhere you go you can see bats flying around at night. Now the importance of bats. I cannot overstate how important bats are for the ecosystems around the world and for ourselves for our economies and for our everyday lives. So one of the main things that we hear about, particularly in the US because most of our bat species are insect eating bats is insect pest control is one of their ecosystem services. So bats eat mosquitoes, they eat moths and beetles that can be agricultural pests. I love these images here you can see these poor moths are about to get eaten. But that's what these these bats are doing they're out flying around and eating a lot of insects every night to maintain their energy. I love this fact this is one of my like favorite fun facts about bats. Some of these insectivorous bat species can eat up to half their body weight in insects every night during the summer when they're out foraging. So, if you had to eat enough quarter pounder hamburgers in one night to be like a bat, how many would you have to eat. Now if you want to put any guesses in the chat or actually do the math. You can put some in the chat. But I want to see if we have anybody guessing how many hamburgers you would have to eat quarter pounder hamburgers. Let me see any guesses. Oh I see somebody 350 looks like you're doing good 400. Okay again. Yep. Nick says he could do it. Well I don't know. Okay let's see we got the drum roll. Okay everybody ready for the number. We have depending on your weight 100 to 600 plus hamburgers in one night. Now that is mind blowing that these bats can eat that much and still be able to fly around still be able to move and you know do their their thing. But because flight takes so much energy they really have to consume that much food to be able to maintain flying and maintain their lives. So that's a lot, a lot of insects that they're eating. And if we think about if we scale up and do some more math with the insects that they're eating. If we estimate that one back to eat about 500 insects in the night, not every night but some nights. And then if there's a colony of about 50 but bats which is a pretty typical colony for many species. That's 25,000 insects that that one colony that's in say your backyard is eating per night. If we take that up to a really large scale with all the bats in the United States. This is what the bats are doing the bats actually save the US agricultural industry and estimated about $23 billion every year and this is actually a paper that was published in science. Where they calculated the ecosystem services of bats to the agricultural industry. So basically these bats are eating these agricultural pests like pecan nut case bearer moth corn earworm moth cotton bowl warm moth that destroy our crops. So when those bats eat those insects, the farmers don't have to use as many pesticides on their crops. So that saves the farmer money on their own farm, and then that saves the industry as a whole about $23 billion a year. So again, thank you bats for for being around and helping us with our farms. And now also talking about farming bats pollinate over 300 different plants around the world. Many wild plants and also many commercially important plants. And I love this video you can see this little bat this is a lesser long nose bat that we have here in the southwest US, and then Mexico, and they shove their faces in the plants and they use a really long long nose bat to wrap up the nectar and drink that sweet nectar just like hummingbirds and butterflies and bees do. Talking about birds. I had to have a bird thing in here because I also love birds, but I want to show this picture because here we have a hummingbird that's just been eating from a flower. And I show these side by side to show how much pollen, all the yellow stuff is on each animal. So this hummingbird is so well adapted to getting inside the flowers that they actually don't get super covered in pollen they get some pollen on their head and they spread it around. But look at this bat. This bat and many other bat species get much more covered in pollen than bird species and insects, and they also tend to carry that pollen, a lot farther distances so some bats like this one here can travel up to 30 miles, one way from their roost 30 miles to go feed in a night and then go back to their roost during the day. So they're spreading more pollen over farther distances and really helping pollinate these plants and keep healthy plant populations. So bats are very, very effective pollinators. And I just show some of these here because these are some of the products some of the foods we would not have if we did not have bat pollinators. Bananas. I love bananas who loves mangoes mangoes are one of my favorite fruit. What about avocados. Yeah, I love avocados and what about chocolate my pretty much all time favorite food chocolate cacao the cacao plant is pollinated by bats. And then of course in the middle for all the adult viewers out there, tequila and Moscow, the agave plant is pollinated by bats bats are one of the most important pollinators of agave plants. So without bats, we would not have tequila. Another really important ecosystem service of bats is seed dispersal so some bats like this one here you can see has a fig in its mouth fruit in its mouth, and these bats eat the fruit. A lot of times they'll squeeze out the juice like this one here you can see it's squeezing the juice in its mouth, and they'll spit out the rest of the fruit, or they'll eat it and then eventually you know poop. And what's in that the rest of the fruit. Seeds, and these seeds, they disperse over large distances, and those seeds grow into new plants. So bats are actually very important pollinators seed dispersers for places like tropical rainforest where they actually help regenerate places that have been cut down they spread those seeds and replant the rainforest. And then finally I love talking about the kind of lesser known importance of bats in terms of innovation technology and medical advances. So I just pulled some of these pictures to show how bats have influenced our technology. This here is a picture of a vibrating cane for blind people. And it's basically an echolocating cane that uses basically echolocation to vibrate when it detects some an object in front of the person and then vibrates in the person's hand. And that is based off of bats echolocation. And this is a bat bat drone that flies like a bat so it's based off of the bats flight. And it's often a very much more effective and efficient flyer in small spaces and energy efficient. On the bottom left we have a microscopic image of a pollinating or nectar feeding bats tongue and this is its tongue, and it has these little papilla are like they look like hairs basically like skin that erect when they are lapping up nectar, and that helps them and people have we've designed surgical instruments for heart surgery based off of this type of tongue that can do that with the papilla. And then finally, down here I put this image because bats are very, very good at living very long lives and not getting cancer. The longest known bat in the world was 41 years old, at least in the wild. And it was a bat about this size so about the size of a, you know, small rodent. Usually animals that size live two to three to five years, but bats can live 40 years or more even when they're that small. And, and they amazingly don't really get cancer that much. How do they do that. There's a lot of research going into how bats can live so long, and can fight off cancer, so that we can apply whatever we learn to our own selves and hopefully live maybe someday to be 300 or to find a good cure for cancer. So bats really are kind of the, the fountain of youth, I think, in the future and we never know what we're going to find so having bats around so we can learn from them is very important. Now I want to talk about the bats of Maine because Maine does have quite a few bat species, and I want to show some of them and where you might find them. The bat species that are in Maine are insectivorous so they're eating things like mosquitoes, mobs, beetles, gnats, things like that. And some of them do hibernate in the winter they'll over winter and caves or you know and people's addicts sometimes, or other species will migrate south to warmer climates in the winter. There are two main types of these insectivorous bats in Maine, there are the tree roosting bats or the foliage roosting bats. And these three are the eastern red bat we have here, the silver haired bat, and the hoary bat. These are beautiful bats I love the hoary bat you can see they have white frosting tipped hair. They're very beautiful. Eastern red bats are very common. You're likely to see them. If you see a bat flying around in the evening or like late afternoon even sometimes people will see bats flying during the day. It's likely one of these eastern red bats because they, for some reason they don't mind coming out when it's lighter so you might see these ones flying around at like four o'clock or even three o'clock sometimes in the afternoon. And I love this picture because it shows where these fully adrusting bats are sleeping during the day. They don't actually go into tree hollows. They just hang from the tree leaves and the tree branches. So you could theoretically be walking in the forest and look up and see one of these bats. I had a friend in Athens, Georgia that happened to she was in the park. She was walking and there was this little eastern red bat just hanging out. So they're very hard to find though they're very well camouflaged. And you can see here this is a mama, mama eastern red bat with her three pups. Three babies is very unusual by the way I'll talk about in a little bit. So I'm going to show you this up image and I one of the really fun facts about eastern red bats is that they can actually hibernate in leaf piles. So I've known people who in the winter or the fall have been raking up their leaves in their yard, and they'll find a bat curled up in a little ball. And it's not sick it's not nothing's wrong with it. They're hibernating that's where they can hibernate. So if you do have leaf piles in your yard, especially if you're in a more forested area. I would highly recommend leaving leaf piles and not breaking up your leaves, if at all possible, because you never know if there might be a hibernating red bad there. There are the other bats that are in Maine the other five species that are cave dwellers or tree hollow dwellers or you know in buildings they're they're the actual typical what we think of with bats living in these like hollow areas. We have the big brown bat which is very common. It's it's one of the ones that you'll probably see this little tri colored bat is very small they're about the size half of your thumb thumb they're they're very small. And then I have these three in red below, because these three species are the threatened and endangered species in Maine. So three out of the eight species in Maine are threatened or endangered. This one here the eastern small footed bat is threatened. The little brown bat is currently listed as endangered in both Maine and federally by the US, the federal government, and then the northern long-eared bat also endangered in Maine. And it's currently federally listed as threatened but it's currently like as we speak in the process of being reviewed to be listed as endangered. So it's, I'll talk a little bit more about why why these are endangered especially the little brown and the northern long-eared bat it's kind of a sad story but there is stuff we can do so that's why I was like then on a happy note. So this here is the big brown, it's the likely backyard visitor these are very big browns are very accustomed to living in like suburban kind of people areas, and they're commonly found feeding under street lights so you know if you see bats flying around under a stadium or in the park under street lights, it's probably a big brown there they're very, very commonly found there. So what about habitat where are these bats going to be found. So these worms are found in tree hollows, you know those typical, what we think of with bats, of course caves. This is the most common thing people think of when we say bat is caves. Bridges, bats can also live under bridges they'll find cracks that they'll nestle up into under these bridges so you can sometimes see bats coming out from under bridges. So nowadays buildings, right are addicts or the shutters under under a window, any cracks that you have could be roosting sites for bats. Now, like I mentioned it is endangered species day we are talking about conservation of bats. So I want to talk a little bit about threats to bats we won't go into too much detail but you know feel free to ask questions, I will have time for q amp a at the end. So, one of the main threats. Sorry, so actually give you an overview of bats around the world and their status so globally, when we think about bats those 1400 plus species 24 are listed as critically endangered. 53 of those species are endangered 104 are vulnerable and 226 are what's called data deficient, which means we just don't know a lot about them, and they very well could be threatened or endangered. To total those up. That's about a third of all that species around the world that are some sort of friend or endangered a third. That's, that's pretty bad that's pretty, pretty sad but again that's why why we're here learning about bats and what we can do to help them. And one of the main things that I like to talk about in relation to is that they have very slow reproduction. These illustrate here most bat species around the world have one pup or one baby per year. They do not have litters like rodents or capture dogs, they do not have multiple babies, they only reproduce one time a year with one baby. That Eastern red bat that I showed that picture with the mom and her three babies. They don't have twins or even triplets but for the most part that's only have one baby. So you can imagine if something happens to a colony of bats, and they're only reproducing one baby per year. It's going to take a long, long time for that colony to recover and rebound its population. So this is one reason why bat conservation is so important that we act now and not put things off until there's you know 50 bats left because it just takes so long to recover. So when we talk about threats to bats, by far the main threat to bats around the world is habitat loss or modification or disturbance. So we're talking about roosting sites where they sleep during the day as well as forging habitat where they're feeding. So you know the classic picture of cutting down trees for many bats that roost in trees or in tree hollows. Obviously this can have a direct impact on where they're living, because it'll destroy their roost site. And it can also impact forging areas if these bats use these forests to go find insects and to fly around. If you get rid of those trees you might be getting rid of those insects and getting rid of the where they're feeding. In caves in particular vandalism and human disturbance is a big issue in some areas. You know the classic picture of graffitied walls. There have been, you know sometimes people will go into caves and like have a party and like light fires and you know drink beer like I've been in some of those caves where there's trash everywhere and people are just having a good time but they don't realize that you know just 20 feet further in the cave there's a colony of bats trying to live and now they've been disturbed so they might abandon that cave. So this is this can be a big issue in some areas. And then like I mentioned loss of forging habitat so cutting down trees getting rid of environments where diverse insects live can impact insectivorous bats. And then for pollinating bats the ones that eat nectar. If we're cutting down agaves like you know these plants here this is the flowers. If we cut down those agaves or prevent them from flowering to make tequila or mescal for example, those bats won't have anything to eat. So it's really important that we protect their food plants the agaves in this case. Wind energy. This is kind of a double edged sword because wind energy you know as a renewable energy source. And it's a great source of energy moving forward into the future, but it also has its drawbacks and that drawback being that these turbines is very large turbines can kill bats, eagles, other bird migratory birds. And this is something that we've seen more and more. When the bats are flying for some reason they get attracted to these spinning turbines as they're going, and they get hit by the turbine directly or the pressure change that occurs when the turbines are spinning will actually call cause what's called the batma which is internal basically internal damage their organs from a pressure change, and the bat will die. And this is also impacting migratory birds and eagles it's, you know, it's kind of a big issue. And so there's a lot of work with the wind energy companies to do curtailment to try to reduce how many animals are killed at these facilities. And finally white nose syndrome is, I mean I'm sure most people have heard of white nose syndrome at this point or it's it's been a devastating disease in the US and Canada, so North America. Basically what happens is these little bats like this one here, when they're hibernating in their caves. They get this fungus that we think was brought over from Europe or Asia somewhere brought over by a person accidentally, you know on caving gear or something. And this fungus is invasive here, and it grows on the bats noses their wings their ears. And it basically irritates causes irritation and can eat holes in their skin. It wakes them up from hibernation. And it's the middle of winter it's you know dead winter. There's no insects flying around it's super cold outside. So they try to fly out because they're starving you know they're hungry after they've woken up from hibernation. And there's no food, and it's cold so they either freeze to death or they starve to death. And you know so I've never been in any of these white nose caves but some of my colleagues have and there's just littered with thousands of dead bats. That didn't make it. And this white nose syndrome has killed over 6 million bats, since it appeared in New York in 2006. And unfortunately the fungus has accidentally you know been spread by people on bats from New York state all the way across the US. It's even in Washington state now it's in Texas up in Canada. And this is really impacting hibernating bats. And I remember, or we talked about the little brown bat earlier this little guy here. The little brown bats used to be one of the most common bats that we would see in our backyards, you know, 1520 years ago. They were very common in urban or suburban areas, but colonies of little brown bats have been devastated by white nose syndrome, it can kill 90% of a colony of little brown bats. So much so that the little brown bat has been listed as in danger. In a span of 15 years that went from being one of the most common bats in the country to being listed as endangered. Same thing happening with the northern long-eared bat. White nose syndrome can kill 99% of colonies of that species. So again it's being considered for listing as endangered because of these drastic population declines. I don't like to end talks on such sad notes so I always like to talk about what we can do to help bats no matter where you live, no matter how old you are, you know, options for us to help. So if you do have a yard or a garden somewhere you can actually plant things and you want to get more hands on with helping bats, you can create bat habitat by growing a bat garden. And I like to think about how, you know, how are flowers going to help insectivorous bats? Well, these flowers, if they open at night, if they're night blooming flowers, they will attract these nocturnal insects that the insect eating bats can feast on. So you'll have your own little ecosystem, your own little food chain in your yard. So planting night blooming flowers that open at night. Usually pale in color like this or yellow or some sort of pale color. Herbs and aromatic flowers also again things that attract these nighttime insects. If you can have a water body like a small pond in your area or if you have a river nearby that's great because bats do sometimes drink water directly. And if you can limit the use of pesticides because, you know, these bats are eating these insects that are on these flowers and if they're eating these insects that have pesticides on them, that can cause problems for the bats themselves. So I do have some links down here and we will be sharing a PDF out after the talk. So you don't have to scramble these down but there's some resources here at the bottom for, yeah, for gardening for bats, so check those out. If you have trees old dead snags like these here and there if they're not a safety hazard. Keep them keep them up because bats love dead snags I love these holes. If there's exfoliating bark that's kind of coming off of it they'll roost up under the bark. So keep these snags if you can their great roosting habitat for bats. Put up a bat house so bat houses are a fun way to provide an a roosting option for bats. I love this video this is one of the bat houses we put up in Athens, Georgia. You can see two little bats roosting up in there. And these, these houses can roost up to several hundred bats for the standard bat houses. And they're used to mitigate habitat loss so if you know if there's a development happening nearby or if you have if you have bats in your house currently like in your attic, and if you're trying to get rid of them exclude them. Put up a bat house before you do that exclusion because then they'll see that as a potential place to go when you exclude them. And I have some links here so there are some great resources online to buy fully pre made houses that are really good, or DIY kits, where they cut all the wood they have all the screws, and you just have to assemble it and I've done that with kids as young as five or six, obviously helping them, but they're very easy to put together. And of course you can always build your own from scratch so this bat house builders handbook link at the bottom here actually has plans, full plans of how to build your own bat houses so definitely check those out. And one thing with bat habitat, creating your own bat habitat is reducing predators and I know this is a hot topic, very controversial and gets people all wild up but if you do have cats and if you can keep them indoors that is great for bats and for other wildlife. This picture here, you know, cats are really great hunters, they, they're great predators. So, you know, they all will catch bats. This here is a picture I believe from Australia of, of one cat's stash of dead bats. They can kill lots of bats and rodents and other native wildlife so you can keep them indoors or if you have a call or you can put like a bell to help warn animals at least while, while that cat's roaming around. And of course you can follow and support bat organizations that are actually doing bat conservation and education work. Obviously I have to plug bat conservation international because that's where I work. We are on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. We are actually on tiktok now so check that out too if you're on tiktok. I love to hear from folks. There's lots of other great bat organizations too. So, you know, just Google bat, bat organization and you'll find lots that you can follow and support. And if you want to, of course donations of any sort are very well accepted, you know, we're nonprofits so we run on memberships we run on grants. So, any support is great. But the adoptive bat programs at several of these organizations including BCI is a really fun way to get to support the organization while getting something in return. So, at our adoptive bat program you get a plushie, and there's information about the bats that you're helping, and the money goes directly towards supporting the work that we do. So, definitely check this out if you're a school group or a scout group it's a really fun way to help support the organizations. And finally, before we have time for questions. I always like to tell everyone this share share what you have learned share one fact one thing that really struck you about bats. The more that we share the more that we get the word out there. The more people will listen and the more people will want to help protect bats. They're not often you know the charismatic animals like the polar bears are the penguins. I think they're they're amazing and fascinating and some of them are really cute but again it's fighting against that negative stereotype so please share, even if it's just with one person share about how awesome and amazing bats are. So with that, I put my email down there if anyone wants to email me later but I think we'll have lots of time for questions. Yeah, we do have lots of time for questions. Thank you Dr. Lear so much. That's awesome unbelievable. Folks, if you have questions please put them in the Q&A box down below, not in the chat. We'll lose them in the chat but I'll get them in the Q&A. And I'm going to dive in we have about 13 or plus minutes to ask some questions and I got a couple about bat houses, including where to put them in your house. Someone else asked takes I was told it could take three to four years for bats to find the house is that correct and any other bat house tips. Yes, so I didn't go into the tips because there are so many. So to start with the question about when will you get bats. It's a it's a waiting game. It's a game of patience. Sometimes the bats will move right in within a couple weeks. Other times it could take several years so don't just leave it there for I would recommend at least two like two full summers leaving it in the spot that you put it in before trying to do anything else, because it can take a while. Now in terms of where to put it up. I'll start with saying check out bat conservation internationals website we have information about bat houses. The bat house builders handbook that I linked to in the PowerPoint also has some great tips about where to put them up. But if you even just Google, you know where to put up a bat house or bat house tips, you'll get a lot of great information. Basically, there's two things you want to build a good bat house, and you want to put it in the right location. The bat house has more than one chamber typically so you know the slats those little rooms, two to three or more chambers is great. I like the three chamber bat houses they're they're easy to assemble and put up the size size matters so you know they those ones that you might see on Amazon, not really good you want them to be bigger. And that's to allow the thermal stability so the bats don't want a small house that's going to wildly fluctuate in temperature, just like our house we want a stable temperature inside your more stable. In terms of putting them up at least, at least 10 feet from the bottom of the bat house to the ground is what you should be doing the higher the better though. Building mounted bat houses and pole mounted bat houses tend to do the best tree mounted bat houses tend to do the worst, because they tend to be too shaded and too much in the leaves and cluttered. You need about six hours of direct sunlight a day, depending on where you live but there's a lot of caveats to that depending on where you live. So, yeah definitely check out those tips there's lots of good information online. Thank you Dr. Lear we have a ton of questions. So I'm going to ask you some rapid fire questions we got some great questions from some students out there. And so I'm going to run through some of those so I'm going to ask for just quick hit answers. Do some bats drink blood. They do there are three vampire bat species in the world they all live in Mexico and Central and South America. Not Portland Maine. Not Portland Maine. Do bats eat fish. Some do. There is one that's called the bulldog bat Google it is a video of it catching a fish with its back feet and eating it. Crazy can bats swim. And actually it's they like kind of like flying in the water again YouTube bat swimming, they'll see him swimming. Our bats friendly can they be kept as pets. We cannot keep bats as pets because they are wild animals and friendly, there are some that are more calm than others but they will defend themselves right if they get scared just like we will so don't ever pick up a back they might try to bite because they're scared. And now some questions from some students at Reiki some first graders. Are there bats in the city of Portland or only in the forest. There are bats in the city so those big brown bats say they're very adapted to people so you might see some flying around your school or your house. Very cool. And why do humans need to help bats. They don't need to help bats because they are going extinct some of them are. They are very important for us and I think they're really cool so I think we should protect them. All right, and then one from flurry and eight year old our bats afraid of people. I think bats are afraid of people when they're flying around but if we catch them like when we study them. I don't think they like that so you know they're not going to be afraid of us flying around but you know they get they get nervous when we get too close. Other than cats what type of how many what other predators. So the natural predators are things like owls and hawks so birds of prey snakes will sometimes eat them from their roost raccoons. Yeah those are kind of the main ones. And then of course cats. Can you talk a little bit about bats getting rabies how common is that or does that happen. Yeah so rabies is very uncommon. It's less than one half of 1% of wild bats are estimated to have rabies. And the bats will die from it too so it's not like they're going to carry it around. But if you do see a sick bat or something that looks sick on the ground or any wild animal don't touch it, because it could be sick or injured. If it's on the ground so get an adult to help and you can look at the wildlife department to get tips on what to do with it. Awesome. Good question from Kim here why only at night. Yeah so at night there are fewer predators, so fewer animals that are can see the bats flying around and be able to eat them. And also a lot of these bats that are eating insects, a lot of insects come out at night, or in the evening. So that's like when their prey is out so it's it's good for them to be out at night to. And I don't want to put you on the spot I know you're in Colorado, but there's a couple of plant related questions in Maine. I might not be able to answer back and hopefully one person asked about species of night blooming plants for Maine and another asked about specific tree species for snags or hollow, wherever bats want to roost. So I'm not sure about the plant list but the master naturalists in your area or if there's like a botanical garden or arboretum definitely check those out a lot of times I'll have lists of those types of flowers. And in terms of trees. It doesn't really matter. They, the big bigger the better so they really like the big old snags. And if there's exfoliating bark so some of that bark that comes off as it gets old. That's really great. But, you know, pretty much any of them are really good to have in your habitat in your yard. Great. A couple people asked about what to do if you get bats in the house. And then check out that conservation international's website we have a whole page about how to get bats out, but you would basically do a one way exclusion find where they're coming out, and then put like a mesh over that hole so that they can get out, but they can't get back in. And you have to do that certain times of year you can't do it during the summer because their babies are in there so check out the websites and the main department of game and fish also has information to. Great. Tristan asks do foliage roosting species tend towards singular roosting or colonial roosting. That's a great question so they tend to singular so those eastern red bats so silverhead bats, they tend to just be themselves with their big you know pup, they don't roost in groups. Great question. Yeah. David asks a good question to you mentioned how many insects batsy do they eat beneficial insects to like these. Bees since I guess the bees are more out during the day, but I mean they're not going to pick like oh you're bad insect I have to you so yes I'll eat beneficial insects to, but not be since they're out during the day. Great, and Mary Jane under your flower question for she says that Torah or trumpet flower blooms at night in Maine. Very cool. Thank you. I have a question to and I get to do this. I am the thing. You showed that really cool picture of a moth about to get hit by a bat. When you know when a bird catches a moth they like fly to a perch to eat it to do vastly the same thing or do they eat because it's a big mouthful they eat on the wing or do they landed. So a lot of them will land so they it's really cool to watch them catch because they'll use like their tail membrane to like scoop up the moth in flight. And then yeah they'll I mean sometimes they can munch as they go but a lot of times I'll go back to a roost. Just any roost can just be like the side of your house and just hang and eat it. Very cool. If you're doing a great job with the rapid fire questions if you need a break to take a breath feel good. We got more we got more left. Flory asked again, why, why just white flowers. Yeah so those white flowers tend to be they're more visible to bats at night because they're, you know in the moonlight white things tend to be more visible. And they also tend to attract those insects those nighttime insects so it makes sense for the bats to be going there too. And then after asking about you know what species of bats they might be seeing. Is there a way that people can identify, figure out what bats are around. Yes, so they are acoustic detectors that actually plug into your smartphone that can will actually show you the sonogram in real time of their echolocation and it'll I be the species within some degree of error so let me put in the chat it's an echo meter touch, echo meter touch bat detector and just Google that it's a couple hundred dollars so it's not super expensive it's not super cheap but it's, they're awesome. Got a couple of folks concerned about turt wind turbines. Do you think, and some people are asking about whether there might be fewer bats offshore. So that's actually a big thing with, I know with birds to migrating birds and bats can be offshore. So, yes those offshore wind turbines are concerned. But you know there is work to try to work with the wind energy companies to not have the blades going at slow wind speeds. And the bats and the birds are most active as a those slow wind speeds, and not much energy is produced at that time. So if they just don't let them go at that time, it helps reduce the deaths. Not all the companies are on board with that so it's a lot of trying to trying to get folks on board. We'll get them on board. Yeah, I'm going to have, I think three more questions one another from a student are bats blind. No, bats are not blind so all bats have eyes all bats can see, but some of them also use echolocation so that sonar in addition to using their eyes. Yeah, and they can see better than us at night. Another ID question and I'm interested in the answer to this can ask, can you tell which type of bats from their poop. Yeah, so not every species but some like the evening bat that I used to work with have really big gigantic poops. And so you can tell. And you can also like not the everyday person but we can send poops off to labs and get genetic testing done like the DNA that's left behind and identify the species that way. But sometimes yeah you like that is definitely or it smells some species smell a little different like that's a Mexican free tail. That's when you know you're a bat expert is when you know I smell a couple more there there's so many good ones on your ass you mentioned don't break up your leaves when is it okay to break up leaves. So in May the hibernation so October through April ish is when they're going to be really in that hibernation so basically during the winter you don't want to you want to leave those there until the spring. Another question from a nine year old are there bat eating bats. There are. Yes, there are there. Oh my gosh there's some videos on YouTube YouTube's amazing of these bigger bats like the ghost bats of Australia eating other bats. Okay, we don't have any time for questions there are more questions. The rest, we can get in touch with you Dr. Lear or get in touch with made out of honor and RCM will happen to answer any more questions thank you to everyone who joined but we have a few last words from Melanie and myself. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much Dr. Lear that was really fascinating and your pictures were incredible so thank you so much. You guys have shown us why bats are so important need to be protected and how people like us can help, but another tool we have here in the United States to protect actor species like bats, and to restore their populations to healthy levels is the endangered species act or the ESA. The ESA was signed into law nearly 50 years ago in 1973. It has saved dozens of species from being lost forever. Here in Maine, the Bald Eagle was once an endangered species but because of recovery efforts it was delisted and now is thriving, which you all have probably witnessed yourself. The ESA can continue to be successful but only when there's funding to do the work. Of course, there are thousands of threatened and endangered species across the country and money is needed for research planning outreach education and projects to keep those species from going extinct. But to get that funding, Congress needs to act. That's why NRCM and Maine Audubon are calling on Congresswoman Shirley Pingree, an environmental and climate champion for Maine's first congressional district, to increase funding for the endangered species act in the next year's appropriations bill. But we need your help, all of you, when Congresswoman Pingree hears directly from you, her constituents, she's more likely to listen. We've made it really easy for you to send your own message to the Congresswoman asking her to boost funding for these critical fish and wildlife programs. So go to the chat and click the links there to take action. Thank you so much. And I have one more. This is about the Northern Long-Eared Bat, which I'm going to put another link in the chat. As Dr. Lear explained, Northern Long-Eared is one of the species of bats that is severely threatened by white-nose syndrome. Their populations are crashing. But the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the Endangered Species Act right now, is considering whether to uplist the Northern Long-Eared Bat from threatened to endangered. And if you've gathered anything from this presentation, you know that they are endangered and we need to act to protect them. So they are taking comments through Monday, this Monday, a couple days from now. And so I'll put it there again. If you want to add your name, your students' names, your parents' names, to this petition we have that we're going to send to the Fish and Wildlife Service on Monday saying, yes, please list them as endangered, not threatened. We need to protect these bats. That would be great. We'd love to have your name in that link. And thank you so much. Well, we have a few more minutes because I went quicker on my thing that I thought I was going to. So I'm going to jump back into questions. Sounds great. We have more, so we might as well. Awesome. So for folks who are sitting around and ask, Dr. Lear, how did you become interested in bats? I love this question. I've always been drawn to bats because I've always rooted for the underdog and I think bats really are an underdog. They're very underappreciated. So in Girl Scouts and Night Hikes, we would take during summer camp by, I loved watching the bats. And then, yeah, built my first bat houses in sixth grade. I went to college and I studied zoology and actually got to go down to Texas and do hands-on research with bats for several summers. And that's when I knew bat conservation was my dream job. Very cool. A couple other bat house questions. One, should they be painted dark in Maine to help with warmth? And number two, how do you prevent predators from getting in? Great question. So the color thing. So historically, yes, we would say dark colors up in the northern parts of the country like Maine. But with climate change, summers are getting hotter and there's more of those really hot days. So we're seeing sometimes those dark bat houses can actually cause the bats to overheat. So I would go probably for more medium color, medium shade nowadays. And then predators, pole mounting or mounting on the side of a house or a building helps prevent predators from getting in. That's why one of the reasons tree-mounted bat houses are vulnerable to snakes and raccoons. You can also put a predator guard like on the pole. So it's like a collar. You know, like the collar of shame for the dogs on the pole to help prevent like snakes from crawling up. Very cool. C.M. Pyle, you mentioned that bats are not rodents. What family and genus are they? So bats are chiropractor, which actually translates to hand wing, which is really cool. And I want to, so there's a lot of evolutionary research going into bats, but they're more closely related to people, to shrews, to whales, primates, then they are to rodents, which is kind of mind blowing. But chiropractor is what the hand wing, what they belong to. Do bats eat caterpillars? They can, yeah. So there's actually some bats in Arizona that I just saw that will eat these caterpillars and they'll glean them off of the foliage and chomp down. They're really good protein sources. Protein burritos, we call them. Pretty much. Faye asked, there's no treatment for white nose? So there's a lot of research going into treatments for white nose right now. So there's like antifungals, there's bacteria that can help kill the fungus, there's vaccines, there's lots of research. The thing we have to be careful of is that we don't disturb the cave, the natural cave ecosystem and like kill all the other stuff in there. And it also has to be a treatment that's scalable so that we can apply to hundreds of caves across North America, right? So there's a lot of research going on into that. Gotcha. If you find a colony in your house or somewhere, should you call a scientist or what should you do? So that's a great question. So I'm not sure about Maine, but there's some bat groups in other states that do like citizen science research on bat colonies. So check that out if just Google like Maine bat citizen science and see if there's any active projects going on. And then in terms of keeping them like they're not, they're not rodents, they don't chew, so they're not going to cause like structural damage. They do poop and pee just like every other animal. So that could be a concern for you. If it's a few bats, I wouldn't worry. But again, if you do want to get rid of them, check out the PCI's website for exclusion. Do bats return to the same area or trees each season? Yeah, they do. So they do move around a bit, but they also have great memories and they have site fidelity. So yes, they'll return to the same bat house, the same roost, the same house over the years. They might move on eventually, but yeah, they do return. Great. What's the rarest bat? Oh, the rarest bat. I forget off the top of my head. I know the Living Stones flying fox is one of the one of the most endangered bats there. So those flying fox species tend to be pretty, pretty endangered. I saw some flying foxes in Australia, which didn't seem endangered because they were gigantic and everywhere. It was awesome. Yeah, those ones are on the mainland. They're not as threatened on the islands. They tend to be more. So Patricia wants to clarify it's not the fungus that kills the bats. It's the starvation after the fungus. Yeah, exactly. So well, it's kind of a two for one thing. The fungus won't necessarily kill it per se, but it'll can create like holes in the wings and make it really hard for the bat to fly or fly well. But yeah, the starvation and the cold. Do we have any dangerous bats? I mean, like I said, there are carnivorous bats that eat other animals, but they don't eat us. So no, no, even the vampire bats are not like out hunting for people. They just make little cuts in like the foot of a cow or something and lick up the blood. Mate for life. No, not really. They tend to just be, you know, mating roosts and mating caves and they just mate with whoever. Interesting. What's their gestation period? Oh, this is cool. So yeah, so some bats will so cool. Some of the female bats, they mate in the fall, typically some bats will get pregnant. Like they'll, you know, they'll fertilize the egg and then hold the development until the spring when they're out of hibernation. Some will actually not implant the sperm in the egg until the spring to hold it over the winter and then implant in the spring. So it's like mind blowing how they can do that. And like I said, it's one baby a year. So it's very, very slow. Do you know the smallest bat? Yes. So it's called the bumblebee bat or hog nose bat. And it's about the size of your thumb tip, just the tip of your thumb. They weigh less than a penny. They weigh less than a penny. They're tiny. Their wings are really small. You're saying that the entire bat is the size of my thumb? Yeah, when it's like wings and all. Well, not with its wings outstretched, but with its wings and their body thumb tip. Holy moly, where do they live? They're in Thailand and Asia in that area and forested areas. Unbelievable. Yep. You're, you did it. It's one o'clock. You answered 50 questions in 10 minutes. Holy moly, everybody. Thank you so much for joining. I'm sorry. We couldn't even get to all the questions. But thank you very much again for joining main Audubon and for joining NRCM. And thank you so much to Dr. Lear. This was outstanding and thank you for the work that you're doing to protect bats. They need help. We, yes, it was recorded. This was recorded for folks who want to watch it.