[Music]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the
people of a lion to energy who brings safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
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Coming up in Wisconsin, tiny creatures of the night
have more in common with humans than you might think.
A Jane's Volanteak shop leaves a haunting impression
on visitors, and medieval technology is paired with
pumpkins for smashing results.
[Music]
Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Lowe.
Each week we bring you the people, places, and issues
that make this state unique.
Tonight we celebrate the spooky season that is Halloween.
We begin by introducing you to a man who works the
graveyard shift in an old mine.
Dave Radell as a bad ecologist, and nighttime is the best
time for him to get up close and personal with those furry
swooping creatures of the night.
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They are one of the world's most common mammals.
Common but seldom seen.
That's a little life that is largely hidden from us.
Their home is the territory of night.
You might see them at dawn circling the sky, or
as they exit an old barn, or swarm their houses at sunrise.
But bats are not usually in our sight lines.
They like corners, crevices.
But with the right equipment, infrared cameras, they are
revealed in their turn in their landscape as magnificent
hunters racing through the sky.
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It's unfortunate.
The most of our experiences with bats
are of the unpleasant kind.
The "Oh no, there's a bat in the house" kind.
The man doing this particular bat
extraction is Dave Radell.
This will be good.
We can take him for later
and record his calls.
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Radell has spent years collecting bats and data
about bats.
He's a batty collegeist.
Currently completing graduate studies on these
critters at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Put him down there so they're not crawling around.
Tonight he's tagging them.
A laborious process that's part of his research.
I haven't caught that many more towards the hundreds
rather than thousands.
Getting reference calls takes a
lot longer than you'd think.
It requires time and glue and getting up close and
personal, with a creature that sends most of us running.
Running from an animal that weighs just grams.
An animal, a fellow mammal,
that may scare us, but that also shares so much with us.
For example, hands.
You can see there he's grabbing on with the
thumb. If you imagine our hand, shorten up these two bones here
and extend these bones here.
Put a membrane between them and you can see there.
This is their hand right there.
That's what the tarotter means, the order, and the way.
For Radell, these bat adaptations make for the
fascination. But in the past, these animals didn't receive
much scientific attention.
And bats' traditional bat PR is not the only reason why
researchers have stayed away.
I think bats have been understudied, not just because
of the lack of interest, but because they're difficult.
They fly at nights.
They produce sound above the
range of human hearing.
This is what we use to monitor the bats as they fly around
the landscape.
It's a bat detector or ultrasound detector.
There's three pieces for the echolocation.
A search phase, and then a pursuit,
and then a capture or an attempt to capture.
And there's two bats at the back.
This is it divides the frequency by a null
number. It brings it down to a level that we can hear.
We can see we're getting into a different shape and
frequency. And this is likely the big brown bat.
More research is coming out and attempts are being made
to identify the species.
Which is what Radell is attempting to do here to ID
species by their specific cause.
There are different species, we only use a different color
light tag.
It's blue one here.
Maybe I'm a situator.
Not to worry, the tags are very light and fall
off in a day or two.
You can actually play it in half speed.
A sophisticated software program translates those bat sounds,
sounds above the range of human hearing, into sonograms,
pictures of bat calls.
This you can spread it out a little bit, get an
idea of what the shape is.
After a while you can start to see what the different
bats are doing and it changes in the different habitats.
A picture of their invisible calls hidden from our hearing.
Miles away in the central part of the state is another
part of Wisconsin's bat world hidden from view.
Radell is walking on it.
Radell is on his way to the mother of all bat houses.
He slips through a grate and hikes
up a highway culvert and arrives at the entrance of an abandoned
mine, the old iron bridge mine.
This is the farthest we can go, just because this is
where the culvert ends and it's not stable after here.
Back in that darkness are 15 acres of mine, twined with
over 4 miles of tunnels.
This is where they get on iron ore, one of the largest
producers of iron ore in the country back in its time.
Right now it's a bat hibernation site.
It's been abandoned as a mine and it's become a
really great place for bats to hibernate at it.
It's 100% humidity in the ancient site.
The miners moved out and the bats moved in.
A lot of bats moved in.
I would say 150 to 200,000.
It may look sparsely populated now, but in wintertime, back in
that mine, there's a slumbering bat city just slightly smaller
than the city of Madison.
In terms of hibernation sites, it's one of the
largest in North America.
And in terms of research, it's a precious sanctuary.
The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee now owns the
mine and uses it as a closed scientific research area.
See what this is measuring and it's measuring the
air flow through the mine.
This muck filled mine is Dave's lab.
It's an infrared beam that shoots across and on the
other side is a detector.
A place to ask some basic questions about bats.
For example, exactly how many bats hibernate here?
To answer that, Redel has set up a monitoring system that
utilizes beam break technology.
You see the green one and the red?
It's different corrections.
They're bat went out.
They're one hand that's just my own moving though.
Let's test it.
So let's show you that that beam is
working. You can see it comes the bat's going in and out.
Data from these devices is sent to a receiving station
and can be downloaded from anywhere in the world.
It's a world that is not without peril for
these fragile creatures.
Just outside one of the entrances to the mine, two
bats are trapped in the burrs of a bird-up plant,
a non-native species.
This one, it's a female little brown.
It's got its teeth right on the plant.
Got stuck here and tried to chew its way off.
Fellow mammals that fuel our fears, fears
that may be unfounded.
Redel corrects common myth about bats and rabies.
I think the percentage they usually quote is less
than one half of 1% bats.
When they get rabies, they're not similar to like cat dogs,
raccoons and skunks where they get the furious form
that they foam at the mouth and will actually attack you.
Typically when a bat gets rabies, it gets sick, falls
to the ground, flaps around and we eventually die.
So that's what they say.
If you see a bat sick on the
ground, don't pick it up.
Those are the ones you try and avoid.
Other than that, if they're flying around buzzing you in the
middle of the night, as you're out walking, there's typically
nothing to worry about there.
It's the middle of the night.
Redel's work day.
As he explores this unseen world, the
territory of the bats.
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A large part of the Halloween celebration revolves around
pumpkins. People carve them into jackal lanterns, use
them in table arrangements, even make them into pie.
The rice-like man in our next story has yet another use
for the round orange gourds.
Hume Amson uses pumpkins to get medieval.
Our packet has our story.
It is a right-of-fall for Wisconsin school children.
The field trip to the pumpkin patch.
See the petting zoo.
Ride the hay wagon and of course pick
up a pumpkin of your very own.
It's an educational experience.
The objective, according to the web page for the
produce patch and rice lake, children will learn
photosynthesis, pollination, the honey making process,
the harvest of fall produce, and the care and feeding of
domestic and exotic farm animals in age-appropriate
terms that they will understand and remember.
I said to a spider to hit my right eye like best.
I saw the farm pumpkin and it was
like cool because I didn't know if it's mashed or not.
Oh and these four-year-olds from Amory will also
learn what it means to get medieval with pumpkins.
This is a tribute shade actually and it's a medieval type
catapult and they used to use this like if there was a castle
wall they could get over the wall and throw fireballs in,
they'd throw in dead animals that would poison the water
supply and things like that.
Okay, are you ready out there?
Right now the pumpkin's facing that way.
But it's going to arch around and go up.
We're going to try to hit the
camera man up there, okay?
What, we missed them.
As the saying goes, moms love it too.
That was really neat and he almost got the camera
guy. I think the first time he flew the pumpkin.
Some farmers look at a pile of scrap iron and see another
mess that has to be cleaned up to make things presentable
for visitors.
But not Humomson.
I had a pile of iron and it was like set on a catapult,
some assembly required.
The trebuchet is about 30 feet tall.
Momson estimates he has about $500 invested
in it.
Most of that went for the electric winch he
uses to cock the device.
The steel drums filled with concrete which supply the energy
way about a thousand pounds.
Think for a moment about the ratio of a thousand
pounds to the pumpkins weight of 20 to 70 pounds.
The one I just threw, the inner type jackal lantern
pumpkin which goes pretty good.
This is a Atlantic giant variety.
Those explode better.
They have a thicker flesh on them.
Bigger cavity, you see cavity inside and when they
pop they really pop and they fly better, two because
they're a little denser.
Kids love it.
I mean the main reaction is do another
one, do another one.
Hugh Momson tells us that his trebuchet tosses pumpkins
up to a height of 200 feet.
In our next story it's not pumpkins flying through the air
but bats, thousands of bats.
Yellowstone State Park in Lafayette County has a volunteer
who makes it his mission to put out the welcome mat for
these nocturnal creatures.
Campers at Yellowstone Lake State Park in Lafayette
County don't worry much about mosquitoes.
That's because the park has a large population of bats.
Bats made right at home by Kent Bortriding and his wife Jane.
Bats are just so interesting, so fascinating.
Bortriding put up bat houses here in 1995.
He visits weekly to document every detail of
their use, what size, shape and temperature bats prefer.
Bortriding is experimenting with nine different bat house
designs. Since 1995 he's installed 32 houses at the park.
He estimates there are 4,000 bats who call his houses home.
He says he put up the houses because bats are in serious
decline all across America, a decline caused by humans.
It's just a loss of habitat and bats used to use trees
almost 100% and then as man tore the trees down,
why they moved into buildings and now especially
in this area there's so many old farm buildings
in that being tore down.
And of all bats enemies, man is their worst enemy.
They're one of the most endangered landmaps
on North America.
In fact, according to bat conservation international,
there are 40 species of bats living in North America.
Of that population, more than 50% are in severe decline
or listed as endangered.
Around the world bats play a key role in the
life cycle of plants.
For instance, in the southwestern United States, bats
pollinate the Seuoral cactus.
In tropical rainforests, fruiting bats spread seeds
through their droppings.
They're responsible for up to 98% of the rainforests.
There are many more direct benefits to humans
resulting from bat research.
There may soon be an anti-coagulant made from
vampire bat saliva used on human heart patients.
Even bat droppings or guano benefit humans.
The bacteria growing on the guano and caves has been
used among other things to detoxify waste, produce
gas-a-hal and antibiotics.
They can delay their aging process.
The space agencies study them for about 15 years
now of how they can delay that aging process.
The bats have the ability to defer the pathology,
the travel radiation.
Radiation is a real big problem in space.
And it also would be useful in nuclear accidents.
And a lot of people don't know that.
For campers, the benefit provided by
bats is closer to home.
According to bat conservation international, each little
brown bat living in these houses can eat 1200 insects an hour.
Bats have the ability to eat very fast.
They can eat one and a half times a week easily.
That's like a person eating 300 hamburgers, 500 pizzas.
And bats go on the fly.
Bortriding is full of bat facts.
His fascination with bats has fueled his extensive
efforts in bat house research.
Research that's led to a national reputation as an
expert on bat house designs.
I study the bat houses a lot when it's hot.
Because that's usually when they all abandon it when it gets too
hot and the different designs.
And it varies from a half inch at the top to an inch
and a quarter at the bottom.
He is always experimenting with different kinds of bat houses.
As you tour around the park and are looking at bat
houses you'll see different shapes, different sizes,
made of different material.
Anything and everything he can think of, he tries
to make a bat house of it.
And then he documents whether it works or not.
He's a great guy.
It's a very good location because it has almost 10 to
12 hours of sun exposure.
And it's near water.
It's important to be within a half
mile to a quarter of a mile from water for bats to drink.
The trees are far enough away too.
It's only about 25 feet or 30 feet away from trees.
But you want to be near some if you can.
Because the bugs will congregate in the bats of feed, what
they call the tree canopy.
And when bats first come out they like to
go amongst the trees.
It's just inherited instinct in case there's
hawks or owls around.
Because hawks and owls they can almost time what time their bats
are going to start coming out.
Bortriding began his bat experiments because he
likes to build the houses.
He offers advice for wood-be-carpenters.
If I use plywood I like to use AC, the best
fur plywood I can buy.
And then just make sure your cock is real good.
And I use screws in the back and put cock on your
screws too because they'll keep the moisture from
falling on the screws in.
I like to use some old or wood like on the side pieces in this
that has some old wood smell.
I like to use a latex primer and a good latex paint.
But don't use a Kills primer KILZ.
It has some kind of odor and bats don't
seem to like that odor.
And definitely paint them.
A lot of places say you don't
have a paint them because as that wood dries out the moisture
dries out it'll cool a bomb.
So paint them.
And I'll paint this black so I can
get a higher temperature gradient at the top.
For campers at the park the show begins at dusk when the
bats swoop down from the houses like skydivers and free fall.
Infrared light makes it appear bright to the
camera but not to the bats.
Bat's feet about 10% of the time and they feed
approximately two hours.
And they'll find a nightroost too they
come back to the houses.
These are all nursery colonies here.
Young bats are called pups and they
usually only have one pup.
Then just before daylight they'll go out again
for about another hour.
And that's when you see the dawn swarm.
That's when the bats swarm their
boxes when they come back.
They'll go up into houses and come out again to teach
these young how to swarm the boxes and where it holds.
Kent Bortriding not only knows a lot about bats he
loves to share his knowledge.
He hopes that if people learn how beneficial bats
are they might care enough to help them survive.
Now I do, I can just be one.
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We move now from bat houses to haunted houses.
This time of the year a lot of
people look for the thrill of a chill down the spine.
There are hundreds of spots around the state that
folks swear are haunted.
A settling foundation or footsteps in the attic.
The wind in the tree tops or a ghostly whisper.
The fun can be in what you choose to imagine.
Well it doesn't take much for the mind to play tricks
when walking through a Jamesville antique shop
that some say is haunted.
It's also where Rock County's first documented
murder took place.
Our student intern Wendy Krauss and videographer Wendy Woodard
braved the spirits of yesterday to lead us on a spooky tour.
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The first murder ever documented in Rock County
happened right here on the spawning premises and it was
actually in the spawning woods.
There are more stories told about this back room than
any other in the house.
It's generated quite a bit of activity.
A lot of people have claimed that
they've had whispers while in this room back here.
Also cold hands touching their back or their neck
as they're walking through.
These are very active quarters.
These were once known as the slave quarters of the house.
And you can tell that the change in temperatures are
very noticeable.
It's colder.
I never like being back here.
There's an old staircase and if you look back in there, that
is really spooky especially when you're here alone.
People have been down here and they have said that they have
sensed something looking at them from that old staircase.
A couple that had been shopping up here.
The wife had been shopping in the
back at the Christmas items and the husband had been
just standing here waiting.
He turned around and he saw this woman walk in period dress,
walk into this green room.
She turned and looked at him and he kind of thought that
was really neat to see a woman dressed in period dresswear.
Then they went downstairs and found out there
wasn't anybody that that description.
So we do believe that it was possibly Lydia.
There are different types of hauntings and a couple of them
are, well one of them is an intelligent honing which means
that the spirit of our ghost present is actually using...
It's trying to communicate with you in one way or another.
It's trying to talk to you or manifest itself in front
of you to make sure that you're aware that it's there.
One of the more common types of haunting and a lot of what's
here is probably called the residual haunting and that's
similar to this house being a very large battery storing
up energy that had happened at one time in the past.
When the spirits try to talk with us, we can't understand
what they're saying because it sounds like a chirping
or it sounds like a high pitch noise in our hear.
Whisper so fast that you can't even understand
what they're saying.
It just comes out as a...
It's on a high frequency so you just can't make out what
it is but you hear this high pitch noise in your hear.
A lot of customers have noticed that here too.
They definitely want us to know they're here.
It's when we are communicating with us is to let
us know that they are definitely around and that they're
interested in communicating.
There are many more sites in Wisconsin that are rumored to
be haunted.
For a look at an old morgue and a theater with
a spectral audience, tune in to hear it now this weekend.
It's on Friday night at 7 in most of the state Sunday
morning at 11 in Milwaukee.
You can also find links to more spooky places around the
state by going to our website.
The address is www.org/inwisconsin.
You'll find more information there
about all of our stories.
We leave you tonight with a parade through the pumpkins.
Every year a Madison man carves dozens and dozens of pumpkins
and displays them in his yard.
Enjoy and we'll see you again next week.
For in Wisconsin, I'm Patty Low.
Have a safe and fun Halloween.
I've been doing this about 15 years.
A couple of years after I moved into this house I started
doing some of the carving.
I started out a lot fewer than it is now.
Most of it was like 10 or 15 the first couple of
years and then after a while it got to be a little bit larger.
And now, during 70, between 70 and 80 each year and at the
most I've done 120 any year.
And after we carve out most of these things, the guts
and all of the etching pieces, this all goes into
the compost pile and back.
And then whatever seeds grow out of there, whatever
pumpkins grow out of there, we use those next year.
There's usually at least two or three that
will grow out of there.
And we use those to carve the next year.
[Music]
Major funding for in Wisconsin is provided by the people of
Alliant Energy who bring safe, reliable and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods and life in
Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliant Energy, offering energy saving ideas on the web.
[Music]