- Hello and welcome to the Northern Lights Tour
of Wednesday Nite at the Lab
here at Rhinelander High School in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.
My name is Sara Richie.
I am a family living educator with the
University of Wisconsin Extension Oneida County.
I would like to introduce our speaker tonight, Joel Knutson.
Joel was born in Iowa City, Iowa
and spent many of his summers
up here with family in Rhinelander.
He is currently the Interim Community,
Natural Resources and Economic Development agent
with the University of Wisconsin-Extension in Oneida County.
Joel has been involved in Citizen Science programs
for the last several years.
Tonight, Joel will present "Beyond Counting:
"Wisconsin Bat Project and the
"Positive Multiplier Effects
"of Citizen Science Monitoring Programs".
(audience applauding)
- One of the things that is a pretty good defense mechanism
when you follow somebody like Dr. Endelman is
self-deprecation and humor.
So I'm glad I thought of that slide before.
I didn't actually know if I was going to go first or not,
but now that I'm going second
I'm glad that's how I'm starting off.
And as I listened to the talk before me,
what I was struck by was that it's really,
what's taking place here tonight and throughout Wisconsin
is the very essence of what we call the Wisconsin Idea.
And as Sara introduced, though I grew up in Iowa City,
I was a summer kid here in Rhinelander
and I was very, very fortunate to have attachments to
Wisconsin Public Television,
which has been a connecting,
a way to really connect to the natural world
in ways that are fun and informative.
And that's a connection that started
when I was a kid and continued.
When I cut my cable living in Madison years ago,
I was actually momentarily worried about
what was going to happen to my science programming,
until I discovered the three digital channels
of Wisconsin Public Television.
Wisconsin Public Radio played its own unique role because,
and I'm sure there's other people in the audience
who'll feel the same way,
if you listen to Larry Meiller enough
and in particular his episodes with Scott Craven,
you feel like at the end of the day that you deserve
some sort of graduate certificate
in whatever the topic was.
I don't even really consider myself a gardener,
but I'm just as much as a junkie for
"Garden Talk" as I ever was for "Car Talk".
And what that really gets to is that in Wisconsin,
we've really cultivated a connection
between high level science and Citizen Science,
and Citizen Science at the grassroots.
And by doing so we're say that it's more
than just data on spreadsheets.
That the social element and the community connections
that come from applied science in our everyday lives
are just as important.
So what I'm doing here tonight and throughout my project
is we're talking about some of the difficult issues
that surround bats and getting people engaged.
But we're also looking at it as a way,
means of using Citizen Science as an effective tool
in bridging gaps, often times between organizations
and associations within communities
and in some cases as you'll see tonight,
it may even have the potential to kind of create a new spark
in some of the organizations that have been at the forefront
of Citizen Science Monitoring for years.
So in addition to thanking Wisconsin Public Television,
Wisconsin Public Radio, it's also worth noting the support
of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
and the Lumberjack Resource Conservation
and Development Council,
as well as the Wisconsin Alumni Association
of which I'm a proud member, and the UW-Extension.
So a little bit of background on the Citizen Based
Monitoring Network in Wisconsin.
The Citizen Science programs in Wisconsin
have been described as being something
that's both simultaneously top down and bottom up.
And where the bottom up aspect happens
are all of the different communities and individuals
and associations that apply for grants on a yearly basis
to do applied work and research
right there in their own communities.
It's top down in a sense that the state
and the Department of Natural Resources
and the University and the different offices
also rely on citizens to accomplish some of their own
important long term goals.
So some of the programs that were funded in 2014
include American Marten Resting Site Analysis,
a project analyzing the flying squirrels of Door County,
bumblebee conservation and the Bat Monitoring Project
under which I received up here.
Ongoing projects in Wisconsin include the dragonfly surveys,
Loon Watch, studies of Karner Blue butterflies and mussels.
It's a very, very broad and dynamic and rich environment.
And the parent organization for my project,
the Wisconsin, the Wisconsin,
Wisconsin Bat Project is part of that as well.
You've got this rich array of topics
under which you can engage.
And I've been involved in various capacities for years
on everything from aquatic and terrestrial invasive species.
I've done some Loon Watch projects.
I even went to some, some dragon,
I mean anytime there's a talk at Kemp or at Trout Lake
or historically within extension,
I would be there soaking it up.
So the question is why chase bats?
What made bats and the
Bat Project of Wisconsin stand out?
And this started as a lot of things do by an accident.
So about three or four years ago,
a friend of mine here in Rhinelander was calling myself
and my father about a persistent population
of bats in her home.
And it didn't take long to find this little guy,
I think I called him Chester,
and I use the image just to give a sense of scale.
This is a little brown bat.
It's probably the most obvious thing
you can have for a species.
And they typically roost to vertical surfaces.
So when you have a resting bat in your home,
it's typically going to be found as this one was,
behind some vertical blinds.
OK, so that was interesting and chasing bats
and trying to figure out how to get them out of this home,
that peaked my interest.
So my first analysis was,
what is it about this species
that I want to get involved further in.
So when you don't have the responsibilities of publishing
and you don't have a PhD behind your name,
you get to just reduce it to "Are bats cool?"
And I'm going to walk you through my
not at all scientific process of answering that question.
One of the things we know in terms
of getting residents to attach to a species of significance,
is it charismatic?
Well, bats have been,
have evolved with a nearly perfect sense
of bio echolocation and migration patterns that are just,
you can absolutely get lost in trying to learn.
If you ever saw the movie "Winged Migration",
you can-- bats are that type of migration but on steroids.
And they also have a tremendous variation
within the species.
So there are bats that we have in,
in Wisconsin that are primarily insect eaters.
We have carnivorous bats that rely on vision and smell,
closer to Central America and Australia.
So there's a lot of interesting things going on about bats,
even aside from the history of vampire bats
and Batman and everything else.
So then the next question is, are they sympathetic?
Have things been done to bats that make them ripe
for sympathy on account of human caused problems
and we're afraid so.
We'll talk about one of the ways in which that's
become a problem later on, but it's across the board.
It's not just disease, Its habitat loss,
it's uncles taking them out with a tennis racket
when they just want to get away from your porch,
that type of thing.
So they've been persecuted by us for a pretty long time.
Then, they don't have to be cute
but if they're not cute, they have to be scary.
And bats get to occupy both.
Half the world seems to think that bats are terrifying
and are going to kill us all, the other half,
myself included, once you get up close and personal,
thinks they're one of the most adorable mammals
on the face of the earth.
And then we've got the question of food chain, right?
So this where we start asking ourselves,
well, how much does this species really matter, right?
Show me the numbers.
Well, we know that bats are critical lynchpin
in the ecosystem, which we'll talk about a little more.
But in terms of their impact on the food chain,
it's very, very difficult from both their significance
in pest control, and down south in pollination,
to even imagine an ecosystem without bats.
And it's very, very difficult to think of
northern Wisconsin environment that would be
bearable during the summer without them.
So they score well there too.
And finally we have the good old fashioned
family values issue.
Can we anthropomorphize how they raise their young?
And the answer is absolutely.
They have tight, very, very tight social bonds.
Bats typically only raise one pup a year and again,
to draw out another analogy, "March of the Penguins"
you would see how different parents would assist
in the raising of a chick.
Well, that same type of concept happens in bats.
OK, so bats score off the charts
on all of the important indicators.
So we know that bats qualify as being cool.
And it turns out the folks at the Fish and Wildlife Service
who Photoshopped this together to celebrate
the day they emerged from some of their caves,
are pretty cool too.
Here's the problem.
If I only go on the basis of things that I think are cool,
as a kid, as a child raised on Ranger Rick magazine
and a steady dose of public television and public radio,
I can find the exact same positive traits in mussels.
I can certainly find them in dragonflies and butterflies.
So in terms of finding focus,
it still wasn't really doing the trick.
At about this, going back to the original story,
at the same I was dealing with this issue of bats,
of excluding bats from a house,
that's when I first heard about the Wisconsin Bat Program.
And Trees for Tomorrow, the Forest Service,
Vilas County Land and Water Conservation,
US Fish and Wildlife and the Discovery Center in Vilas
were all playing some role in either hosting
monitoring units to go out and basically go out
and chase and find out where bats were.
And so I'd like to, a presentation up at
Trees for Tomorrow in Eagle River,
and I got a chance to go and be exposed to this.
A very very highly technical purpose built
highly glitchy echo locator device that we,
is the single tool that we use in Wisconsin
to go and do walking and roost surveys of bats.
And I got really lucky because there's more demand
to do this sort of work up here
than there actually were units.
But it happened to be that there was a gap in the,
literally the sign out sheet.
People were competing to be able
to get their hands on one of these.
I went back to the property where we were having
the bat exclusion issues.
And what happens is...
(gadget noise)
What this thing does is it allows us
to see and record in real time with GPS linkages,
what we can't always see in the trees.
That's not a picture taken from the property,
but it's another, it's another one
from Fish and Wildlife Service.
This tree it was estimated it had about
5000 roosting bats in it.
What this device lets us do is it helps bridge the gap
between when we actually get to see them
and when we don't but we want to know that they're there.
Going around this property with this little monitor
and running around the trees in the perimeter of the house,
it was going bananas.
And what quickly became clear was that
the three or four or five bats that were occasionally
cycling through this house were likely just coming in
for all of the work we did in looking in the chimney
and the soffits and windows and everything else,
there was such an enormous bat population
around this property that there were probably
just coming in when the owner was walking in
with her groceries, chasing a bug at night.
And the reason is that if you look at this,
this is the Google Earth view, you see open pasture.
You see water and shoreline and the Wisconsin River,
native trouts, or trout ponds on the backside,
a mixed use forest.
And you don't have to be an expert in bats
because that is the sweet spot for almost every species
that inhabits northern Wisconsin.
Deer hunters would be gravitating to this spot for example.
There was a variety of fur bears and mammals
I see creeping around through there
that I never get to see anywhere else.
For this particular property,
although it was an occasional nuisance,
in the big picture particularly given the role
that they were playing in pest control,
these bats were actually making great neighbors.
This is getting to one of the bigger pictures, right,
of why we care so much about bats
is that there's nothing else that comes close.
Not even the vautin purple martin
that we spend so much you know energy making houses for
and trying to recruit populations,
there's nothing else that comes close to bats
in terms of their value for both crops,
in terms of both the agricultural and forest economies
of Wisconsin as well as our quality of life.
The 23 billion dollar estimate on a national basis,
the folks at the DNR estimated that I think the value
to Wisconsin's economy alone is about three and a half
to four billion dollars.
More recently we've had an outbreak of emerald ash borer
up here in northern Wisconsin.
That's an invasive pest that's been
rummaging its way throughout the Midwest.
It turns out that bats are one of the few native species
that's actually able to hammer down on the ash borer.
Thinking about where I was finding bats
and how significant this enormous population was
and finding out more about its,
the significance of the habitat,
well at about the same time over on
where I live on Crescent Lake, we've been having,
we have been having the discussions as a lake association
for a number of years about the need to improve
our shoreline habitat, being better stewards of the lake.
And there's more and more research that's coming out
that really unifies a lot of different aspects
of citizen based monitoring
that's focused on improving our shoreline habitats
really from the broader overall perspective
that a healthy shoreline benefits all species
that use the lake and land
and land systems as well as humans.
As I started to talk to folks in other lake associations
and just have these conversations around town,
one of the things that was occurring to me
is that a lot of groups that have been
trying to make this case had been having a really hard time
doing it in a way that's not
beating people over the head.
And we know how effective that is
in terms of property management,
of going up to somebody and telling them
that they're doing it wrong.
One of the things that's been working really well
is we know that there's been a very very active
aquatic invasive species monitoring program
with different volunteer organizations
in the form of boat landing inspections.
We know that there's a terrific network of loon watchers
throughout northern Wisconsin.
So the key is that tying these activities
in into our broader goals of healthier lakes and shorelines
to a point where without the force of law,
without the force of zoning and conflict
that you start to create a sense of a new normal.
It turns out that if you're looking for the opportunity
to talk to somebody about a healthy lake,
it's, you'd be hard pressed to find a better avenue for it
than bat monitoring.
The reason being is that bats come out at sunset.
So when I give a talk to an organization
or I talk to somebody about, even at an individual level,
if this is something that they want to be involved in,
the ask is nothing more complicated than
how do you feel about taking a pontoon ride
around your lake at sunset.
That's it.
And for a lot of groups that have been
really struggling in recent years,
AIS being a good example, there's a lot of burnout
in different organizations.
It's always a challenge to get people involved in,
in new things, this is a way to kind of get people
to reconnect in some of the ways
I was talking about earlier.
That part of our brain that's just naturally curious
about our natural world and the flora
and the fauna that surrounds us,
it's a terrific avenue to do it.
Now when I went to Pelican Lake a few weeks ago,
I was setting up, it was their annual association meeting
and so they had their picnic and I had my Miller Lite
in my stop AIS koozie and somebody was came up to me
and was joking about whether or not that's part of my talk.
And I looked down and I said well
you know it should be and so now it is.
And that's the broader overall point is that,
let's see what did I do with it.
Though this is an expensive,
highly technical piece of equipment,
the only thing that's really involved is turning it on,
working through the PDA (gadget noises)
and pointing it into the woods and trees
until you find something.
That leaves plenty of time of room in the boat
for somebody to have a martini
as they put it around the lake.
I argue whatever it takes to get people involved.
Now why we do it is because these are the sort of
behavioral changes that happen through the technical jargon
would be positive incentive modeling.
I call it reminding people why they live here.
A couple years ago I gave a talk about a redpoll eruption.
We had a huge influx of redpolls coming down from Canada
a couple of years ago and for many people,
it was the first time they had ever seen them.
So I'm giving a talk about redpolls,
and half the room knew what I was talking about
and was so excited because they've never seen these,
these little, these little red birds before
and there's 50 of them at the feeder at the same time,
and the other half of the room
had no idea what I was talking about.
And the reason for that is that
we know with songbird recruitment
that micro level decisions,
an individual property owners can have a big payoff.
You can have a huge nesting bird population
on your property and your neighbor might not have any.
We're trying, again we're making connections of well
if songbirds are important to you, what are the sort,
some of the decisions you can make as a land owner?
Why is the fishing better over by my neighbor is?
Often times it's a function of the fact that
whether you bought into the property or not,
the aquatic vegetation around or coarse woody habitat
around your property's been removed,
where it still has a more
natural environment somewhere else.
Fish tend to gravitate towards those environments.
And again the big one in the last couple of years
is why are the mosquitoes so much worse
over on my property than they were somewhere else.
So again this is a great picture because
all of these things are compatable.
Beach use, pontoons, water skiing,
all of this is part of the same equation.
They're all compatible with attention to bats.
So this is a good way to do all of those things
and to still have a little bit more thought to it.
I mentioned that you can go through this with a,
a beer in one hand and a monitor in the other.
Well here's a pro tip.
You can actually repurpose and old Johnson
out two stroke outboard into a margarita blender
and in fact you should
because if you're drinking margaritas...
OK, not when you're captaining the boat
but when you're the person holding the monitor
the Mexican long-nosed fruit bats are the pollinators
of the agave plants in Mexico that produce tequila.
You cannot have tequila production without bats,
therefore it is absolutely part of being
a responsible citizen scientist in Wisconsin.
About the bats that we're seeing,
all of our bats in northern Wisconsin are migrators.
We have three species of tree bats: silver-haired,
Eastern reds and Hoaries.
And the tree bats tend to migrate
to south bound locations in the winter.
Our cave dwelling bats,
the most dominantly locally are the Little Browns
and Big Browns, tend to migrate towards caves
and mine shafts which means
they may actually migrate north during the winter.
It also includes the Eastern Pipistrelle
and Northern Long-Eared bats.
I mentioned we're on a migration cycle.
So very very similar to songbird migrations,
bats tend to emerge from their hibernaculas
in late April, early May.
They establish their summer roosts
in breeding grounds through June and July.
They begin their fall swarms back to their hibernaculas
typically late August through September and thus,
and then begin the process of laying down
for the winter in October through May.
What we're doing in the acoustic monitoring system
is we're looking at getting data on
not just where the bats are,
but where they're not where we might expect to see them.
And so each volunteer is trained to go out
either walk trails, you can drive,
you can drive slowly or the majority of the trips
I've been doing for on water trails.
And that data then goes back to Madison
to be analyzed by the Wisconsin Bat Monitoring Program.
The data that we're collecting, right,
when I was playing around with the echo locator,
the sonar on the echo locator,
what bats are doing when they're out flying about,
they're emitting high frequency noises.
They have this bio sonar.
They're bouncing signals off of prey.
They're bouncing signals off of trees.
They're bouncing signals off of water
and if they're in the house,
they're also bouncing signals off of you.
So that's why like we say
with a lot of different situations, make yourself big.
It's the same thing with bats.
If you're doing this, they're hearing that.
They're both navigating and simultaneously
hunting for prey when they're sending out those signals.
Now the problem being that the peak time for bats
happens about 30 minutes after sunset.
And we went out on Lake George a couple of weeks ago
and it was pretty slow going until right about 10 o'clock.
And so when people were trying to take pictures
of what we were seeing, this is what we got.
It's kind of like the bat equivalent of a polar bear
eating a Twinkie in a blizzard on a glacier.
Maybe in the next grant, somebody will want to buy us
a high flash strobe camera capable of recording
a brown bat as it augers into the water chasing a mosquito.
But until then, what we use and how we do our analysis
is by these sonar graphs.
What this device is doing is it's basically making us
be able to hear what our ears can't otherwise hear.
So this is what you might hear
if we're chasing little brown bats.
(clicking, chirping noises)
And those series of chirps and clicks
just like when we analyze bird calls,
reflects species specific data.
So it takes a long time to be able to
recognize calls right out of the gate
but eventually with practice you kind of build it.
But in any case that's what we rely on software for.
So in contrast here is an Eastern Red bat,
another species we see quite a bit.
(clicking noises)
Out of that data, we get,
we get to basically determine and tell people
exactly what exists around their waterway.
And that's one of the things that's particularly valuable
about this project because quite frankly
I've been part of a lot of research over the years
where you go out and you do field analysis
and then it goes and it disappears into the ether.
One thing that the Wisconsin Bat Project
is very good at doing is relating this data back
in a way that makes sense for the residents
and users and lake associations to be able to use.
It picks up each species and makes both species analyses
as well as what age we're looking at,
whether they're in roosting or feeding behavior.
One of the things that bats do a lot of
is actually try to jam one another sonar.
It's often the case that when we're out there with a unit,
you saw from that last slide that there's a lot of overlap.
A lot of different colors,
a lot of different species coexisting.
And so bats are very very similar to loons.
If you've heard, if you've ever been to a loon talk
and you've heard the analysis of loon calls.
I should probably ask somebody in the audience
to mimic a loon call but I won't put that on them.
I can't, but the really high pitch tremolo, right,
that people really identify as being the Northwoods
is in fact a loon's way of telling another loon,
I'm male 17B.
I'm three years old.
I own this corner of the lake.
I'm quite virile and I'd just assumed
recommend that you stay away from my corner of the lake.
And then we have that longer mournful wail, right,
the almost yeah, the crying loon.
And that we identify as more of a searching call
of a loon alerting other loons that it is
perhaps available if they might be so interested.
It's the same story with bats.
As the software allows us to kind of get a sense
of what's going on within a given bat community.
Again, I talked about we know,
we get a sense of whether they're roosting.
So they have different, each species has different calls
and whistle and chirp patterns
for what their activities are.
They sound different when they're hunting
versus when they're hanging out on a spruce tree
trying to invite another lady
to go join them on their roost.
Here's something else that you do as a citizen scientist
is you kind of make up your education on the fly.
And I knew before giving this talk
the last thing I should do is go on the internet
and start looking for more things about bats last night.
But one of the things that struck me as,
I was out with a group a couple of weeks ago
and they were talking about bats as flying mice,
not in a particularly pejorative way
but that's usually implied.
I wanted to make sure I threw in a note
about to remind people that are bats
are not in fact mice nor are they even rodents.
They have their own order, Chiroptera
and in fact they're actually closer to primates and lemurs
in the grand order of things than they are to most rodents.
That's old news.
What I found out last night that I wanted to include,
so if you get one good take away tonight,
it's that researchers at my alma mater,
the University of Michigan who've been sequencing
the hearing genes of echo locators,
have discovered that there's a common protein
Preston that makes dolphins and echo-locating bats
more common in this gene sequence
than echo locating bats are
to their non-echo-locating cousins.
And I'm assuming I'm not going to get the cursor
but I did get another good example why.
Going back to the Little Brown.
(clicking, chirping noise)
What that Little Brown doesn't realize
is somewhere down in the Caribbean,
its bottle-nosed dolphin cousin has something back to say.
(gadget noise)
And the thing of that is, and I've got,
you can go online and hear all sorts
of terrific examples of that sort of call,
you can actually get so lost in it
that if you were actually playing
as I was doing all afternoon.
I got into spotted dolphins and other bottle nose
doing mating whispers and clicks and all sorts of things,
its sounds really really similar.
And what a terrific thing to be able to relate that
and to be able to figure that, you know,
these are things that if you just play back bat sounds
and dolphin sounds back and forth,
you'd kind of start to figure out on your own.
And again that's one of the big benefits
of what we're doing in citizen science
is giving people the sort of connections
and confidence that to kind of make sense of the complexity,
the amazing complexity of the natural world.
Here comes the depressing part of the talk,
if anybody wants to you know leave.
You've probably heard about White Nose Syndrome
and regrettably White Nose is making bats famous
because it's the largest single decline
in any North American wildlife in our known history.
What White Nose Syndrome is, is it's a fungus
that happens to appreciate the exact same cave,
dwelling, cold moist environments that our native bats do.
It's a fungus that attaches itself to the wings,
nose and face of hibernating bats.
It is proven to be an almost unstoppable
classic invasive species problem.
It affects all seven species of Wisconsin bats.
And it is estimated both in sampling as well as
body count estimations to have already taken out on
upwards of six million bats and that was back in 2012.
White Nose Syndrome is spread on a bat to bat basis
so you have the problem of once a colony is infected
from one mine shaft or cave
and they move and roost to another,
they can cross infect that colony.
Unfortunately, it can spread from other means.
They, you know just simply,
in fact the reason we think it got here in the first place
is good old fashioned visitors to caves
who transferred the spores on the bottom
of their boots from one cave to another.
It began in 2006, in I think it was first discovered
in Maine or upstate New York.
And it has since been discovered as recently as this spring.
This chart was updated in May of 2015
and it has been discovered in the dominant caves
and hibernacula of both southwestern Wisconsin
and the northern UP including
the Miles Mine up in Iron Mountain.
The problem with White Nose Syndrome
and why it's so catastrophic to our bats
and was potentially catastrophic to our bats in Wisconsin
is that it's the fungus itself doesn't do
anything particularly harmful.
No one dies of White Nose fungus.
What they die of is the fact that
the way this fungus behaves,
it basically awakes the bats
out of their hibernation too early.
And in the process it overheats their bodies
so they're consuming their fat stores way too early.
So now they're waking up and they're waking up hungry
and so they're leaving the caves.
And as you see from the above picture on the right,
when a cave dwelling bat leaves a cave
in the dead of winter, there is no food source.
There are no insects to be found and so
it's a very grisly, either starvation or freezing, death.
The reason it's so catastrophic
for the population as a whole
and why we're paying such close attention
to population trends through the Monitoring Project,
is that as I mentioned earlier, bats rear one pup a year.
They are designed for the long haul.
Very similar to loons that only,
if they get one chick a year, that's remarkable.
Loons are designed to go 15-20 years.
It's the same thing with bats.
So they're not in it, they're not adapted.
They're not a position where they can simply
repopulate through birth rate.
There have been some reports of some promise
on White Nose research, in particular some fungicides
that might be applicable to known cave infestations.
But the problem then is we're still
in the experimental stage
and what we're talking about is one of scale.
It's one thing to somebody out in the woods
or waters with a bat monitor.
It's another to give them a Q-tip and ask them to swab
10,000 brown bats in a particular cave
with a topical cream.
That was the depressing part.
Now the thing is is that we can't do a lot
about White Nose Syndrome here in Rhinelander
because we don't have a lot of hibernaculas here.
Every once in a while, you'll get a bat that
roosts out in a barn and tries to over winter around here
but for the most part the decisions that we have
that are locally that are impacting bats
have nothing to do with White Nose Syndrome.
The problems that bats face locally
are the good old fashioned problems of human interaction,
around here principally in their summer habitat.
And again just simply the classic case
of an irrational fear that bats are intrinsically dangerous
and dirty and flying mice.
They're often the victims of poisoning
and extermination efforts.
They suffer from pesticide impacts up the food chain.
They're vulnerable to climate change
with their migration patterns.
And unfortunately,
sometimes the best laid plans still go awry.
Wind farms and wind turbines
have proven challenging for bats migrating.
And then we also face the issue
of habitat loss and destruction.
That's not my message when I talk to most groups
and when I talk to most kids.
What we're focusing on in this project is simply
getting people a broader understanding
of their positive benefits, focusing on sharing the habitat
with them that we all enjoy,
and in particular getting to kids early
so we start to develop this sense
that this is the new normal in our attitudes
toward what should be a terrific neighbor.
Another plus is that the positive message
for improving bat habitat is entirely consistent
with every other message out there.
There's not a lot specific to bats.
Clean drinking water sources,
that's the same thing you would hear
if you were trying to attract songbirds.
Native plants to attract insects is just as important
for our fish populations as it is for our mammals.
Maintaining forest edges
and leaving standing dead trees and snags.
That's true for any number of species
from salamanders to martins to woodpeckers and the like.
And even leaving wood piles and rock walls
locally within our yards as roost sites.
Nothing terribly complicated.
In a lot of respects it's just leave things alone.
One thing that you can do with our bat population
is to give them a hand is putting up a bat house.
The official recommendations in bat house construction
are that they be built a minimum of eight feet
off the ground and that's for two reasons.
One is bats tend to locate them easier
based on their flight path, fly away patterns.
It's also because it makes the most vulnerable to predation.
And we recommend that they not go on trees or buildings
and I'll mention why that is shortly.
Actually, I'll jump right to it.
Most of our species in Wisconsin
are similar to the bat on the right.
That is a Little Brown.
We're going to call him the not as long-eared brown.
The reason we typically recommend bird houses
go out on their own is because in the process
of using their bio sonar,
the more energy that a bat has to spend diving up
and around trees and trying to avoid obstacles,
the less energy that is has left for
its roosting and food gathering capabilities.
If you have a bat house that is on a tree
or that's on the side of a house,
it's not worth moving it, it's not a prohibition.
And in fact in some cases if your house
is particularly close to your forest edge,
in some cases having a bat house on your siding
may actually be a good diversion
from having them wind up in your attic,
just so long as you're comfortable with the fact that
the paint or siding on that house
is now going to be guano covered.
The exception to that rule is the Northern Long-Eared.
So one of our species is different from the rest.
And as his name suggests, he has much bigger ears.
And so the gift that, that gives the Northern Long-Eared
is that it's able to navigate much denser interior forests
than Little Browns, Pipistrelles, Big Browns and the like.
The downside for Northern Long-Ears
is that it's not quite as adaptable to moving its roosts
and that's why you might have heard
of that particular species is being controversial within
the Wisconsin forest products industry.
The Northern Long-Eared being more capable of working
denser canopies does tend to be found
in denser interior forests where most of our logging occurs.
And because they tend to, like loons,
attach to a particular roost,
sometimes more than a particular mate,
they're difficult to move.
And so the concern is that as an already threatened species
that if a known Northern Long-Eared roost
was destroyed in the context of a logging operation
that it may not be able to recover.
The current recommendation or ask is that
if a particular tree stand is known,
and that's part of the challenge
is knowing that they're there,
but if it's known to include Northern Long-Ears,
we recommend, I think, I say we.
The Fish and Wildlife recommendation is that
the stands be left within
about a quarter mile in any direction.
The next thing we're doing in this project
is talking about getting more,
I mentioned earlier kid involvement in the project.
Of getting to kids early in a way that
creates a more positive kind of identification
with a valuable species.
Now what makes bats a little bit better
if I'm going to sell the Bat Project
over every other CBM thing going on in the state,
it's that we get a chance to integrate
all these different aspects of being outdoors.
And as shop classes and wood shop in particular
has declined from our public schools,
one of the things we're focusing on in this coming month
is taking kids onto bat house building projects
where they will get a sense of bats in their neighborhoods.
We're going to take them out and go around on lakes and,
and their own properties if they want
and actually go out and see who's out there.
And then we're going to get a chance to work with them
on building the bat houses themselves
and to be able to distribute to themselves and their family.
The picture you're not seeing at the moment is...
Oh, you are! Terrific!
So great example, this is unfortunately not local
because we haven't gotten the project off the ground yet.
This was a project that took place down in Arkansas
but I love it because we're saying that,
look the science benefit is obvious.
Less obvious is the fact that you're teaching
hands on skills and giving kids ownership
of what it's like to create
a positive habitat where you live.
And in this case they had the chance
to be artistic on them too.
I've got some handouts in the back
about building bat houses.
And the two I've selected are the ones I like the most
because they're not really overly detailed or fastidious.
There's a lot of information out there
that I think is a little bit overly specific.
If bats are OK hanging out
behind a vertical blind from Menards,
they're going to be OK with just about
any sort of cedar box that you could put up.
So have to be realistic that when one does encounter bats,
as much as I've built them up
as being these wonderful little cuddle bugs of the sky,
it's still important to remember that as insectivores
and ones that can crunch emerald ash borers on the fly,
they've got good teeth.
There is a subpopulation of bats
that gets rabies.
It's true of almost every mammal
but I believe in bats it's,
well it's certainly well under 1%.
It's not to say however that you don't take certain caution.
And whether or not a bat is rabid or not,
a direct bite would still sting a little bit.
We don't, I'm very very comfortable in telling people that
if they encounter bats in a problematic area,
if they net them, if they put them in a box,
they're not unsafe to handle
but you do need to exercise caution
and one would certainly want to have gloves.
This is after all just a cute little, little brown bat.
Now one of the things I can't yet do is handle bats.
There is a licensing process for that.
It does require the series of rabies vaccinations
to be able to do so.
So in lieu of having bats with me,
I brought Captain Jack Sparrow with
and I just don't think it's going to, or wait here we go.
I guess anybody must be on the same
Wi-Fi network as their computer.
Anyways, Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp
is down in Australia and he is
working with Bat Conservation International
and they're letting him in this case nurse
a 10-week-old Australian Fox Bat.
We would love if you were interested
in taking part on, in this project.
There's a number of different ways to do it.
The Wisconsin Bat Program and the phone numbers
and website can be difficult to read
but I do have handouts in the back of the room.
We would love to have you on as a dedicated volunteer.
Typically, bat program monitors are usually responsible
for monitoring at least one route a month.
Those routes being determined principally by
the biologists down in Madison
who are looking for very specific data.
You can also just simply volunteer to go and hang out
in your neighborhood and in your lake
because as part of the process of getting
the positive message out about bats, we go anywhere.
All data is good data and
we're happy to get it from anywhere we go.
So my information on that is also in the back.
It's probably early yet.
I don't think we'd be likely to see any around
the high school but we could maybe walk around
the back by the woods if anybody was interested in that.
And it looks like the Dell is at about its limit,
so that is the completion of my talk.
Thanks very much for listening and do we have any questions?
(audience applauding)