- 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)   - Hello and welcome to the Northern Lights Tour