Posted by Craig Newberry, Communications
The days get darker and the nights can get spookier in the Pacific Northwest, but one creature you shouldn’t fear in the dark is bats. These misunderstood mammals play an important role in keeping our environment healthy. In fact, there are many reasons to become a fan of bats. For example, many of them eat mosquitoes and they are very cool.
During the summer months when bats are at their busiest, Woodland Park Zoo’s Community Science Program Activity trends of bats, to enhance engagement with locals about these winged creatures and how to find them and document their activity. The program aims to monitor bats within the community and promote participation in community social science.
This summer, we held 10 Bat Activity Trends training and meet-ups at seven different locations around the region and online. Over 230 people joined us to learn about Bat and her BAT program.
Meetup on Bat Activity Trends, Green Lake, 2022 |
Overall, 176 observations were recorded by 43 observers. Observers were asked to count “bat passes,” which is how many times they saw a bat pass. When making this type of observation, it is impossible to distinguish and count individual bats, so we use the ‘bat path’ as an indicator of bat activity. One of the interesting findings from our observations was that part of the area where we observed high bat activity was right in the city of Seattle. One of the hotspots was at the Rainier Beach Urban Farm & Wetlands.
Washington State is home to 14 bat species, 10 of which are found statewide. Four of them occur only in eastern Washington. All Wash. bats are insectivores and eat insects.
Bats are one of the most diverse groups of mammals in the animal kingdom and are essential to our ecosystems as pollinators, seed dispersers and pest controlers. Because they are nocturnal, they are a little more mysterious than other creatures and often don’t get their due.
Bat populations face many threats worldwide, including habitat destruction, wind turbine outages, climate change, and light pollution. Additionally, in 2006, white-nosed syndrome (WNS) broke out in the eastern United States, killing millions of bats. WNS is a disease caused by a fungus and subsequently discovered in Europe and Asia. WNS he was first discovered in Washington state in 2016. Scientists are still investigating the impact on bats in Washington, and the zoo’s Bat Trends Program can help in that effort.
To learn more about our efforts to save bats and their species, please visit: www.zoo.org/batconservation.
Meetup on Bat Activity Trends, Green Lake, 2022 |
How to protect bats:
Share about bats: One of the biggest steps you can take to help bats is learning about them and sharing information with friends and family. Fear and misunderstanding can harm bats, so it’s important to educate everyone about all the good things bats can do for us.
Offer a home: You can provide bat habitat in your yard by leaving tree hollows and snags, or by building a bat hutch. Keep cats indoors and reduce the use of pesticides and other chemicals in your yard.Learn more about creating your own Bathouse here.
Contribute to research: I will participate in Activity trends of bats Join the program and help us learn more about bats in western Washington.
We partnered with bat experts to build a suite of engaging educational content for teachers and students for Bat Week 2022. Educators can access all of Batty’s activities by signing up for a free educator account on our latest resource. Discovery Den.
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hope for bats
Summer 2022 Doris Duke Conservation Intern, Maya Lester, shares her experience monitoring bats with our team. Here’s how she describes her internship and her newfound hope for bats in the Pacific Northwest!
“Part of my activities as an intern Doris Duke Conservationist I have spent two summers as an intern. The first summer will be spent working on a research project with a graduate student, and the second summer will be an internship in a field of interest of your choosing. Before starting my internship in Seattle, I didn’t know what to expect. All I knew was that my internship was primarily about bat education and conservation, but I had no idea what that entailed. I was doing radio telemetry in the Florida Everglades all summer last year, so it was a full 180 doing outreach and teaching activities. Not knowing anything about bats, I was a little daunted at first and felt it was a complete waste to educate the general public. But as the summer progressed, I learned so much about these animals that I was finally able to tell people about them.
The most important thing I learned from this summer internship is to believe in both myself and others. Looking at the state of our country, it is often disheartening to see it labeled as the least important topic for those who care about the environment. Faced with this reality, I ask myself: “How can we mitigate the problems caused by climate change and deforestation?” With these questions in mind, it’s easy to feel helpless.
Thanks to the help of mentors and other amazing people I met this summer, I realized I wasn’t the only one in this situation. It was inspiring to see so many people interested in other topics such as bat conservation and climate change. They weren’t ecologists, but they still went out of their way to learn. Through educational events, bat walks, and webinars, I realized that the future of our planet isn’t just a select few. In fact, most people seemed to care more than those who didn’t.
I have also learned to trust my knowledge and my ability to inspire others. Despite coming into the internship knowing very little about bats, he ended up with a vast knowledge of different types of bats, what threats they face, how to help them, etc. I was able to know I can now use this knowledge to educate others and help prevent the spread of White Nose Syndrome.
From now on, I will believe in myself more and believe that other people care about the planet as much as I do. Nothing can change if we all give up now. By doing all we can, even if it’s small, we can make a collective difference in the future of our planet. I am very grateful for this experience and look forward to continuing my research with optimism and conviction. “