NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/708333
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2016 • NEBRASKAland 63 days. Researchers conducting grid surveys by air but couldn't locate the few that left before their batteries died, but at times they a single bat. In the second year of the study, they abandoned the air search and set out a line of data loggers connected to receiving antennas on towers, and set the transmitters on 21 bats to work only at night, doubling battery life. One bat was recorded near Weeping Water two and a half hours after it left Fontenelle Forest, a 25-mile journey. The study had many challenges and leaves questions unanswered. The range of the transmitters is three miles, but is only a half mile in woodlands, where the bats live. And the signal it emits can't be heard when the bats are underground. So they don't know if the bat they recorded near Weeping Water entered a mine or kept flying. And they don't know if others went to the mines without passing the data loggers, to other points in Nebraska, or flew down the Missouri River and left the state. A larger sample could have provided better results, but funding limited the number of transmitters that could be used. Keith Geluso and his UNK students are in the second year of their own radio tracking study in the Pine Ridge to identify the summer maternity roosts of species that are rare in Nebraska or being affected by white-nose syndrome in the east. Funded by the Game and Parks Commission and the U.S. Forest Service, the study tagged 20 bats in 2015 and 40 bats this summer. The first year, the little brown bats they tagged all returned to roost in the attics of buildings at Fort Robinson State Park or in downtown Crawford, even one that was captured six miles away, a movement that surprised Geluso. The long-legged bat roosted in cliff faces. A few of the northern long-eared bats they tracked roosted in live cottonwood trees along creeks. Most other bats roosted under the peeling bark of ponderosa pine snags, of which there are plenty following massive wildfires in the region in 2006 and 2012. Some individuals roosted alone while others of the same species roosted in a group with 5 or 10 other females. One female moved its baby to a new tree every night. The information may help guide future management by the U.S. Forest Service and the Commission. Lemen and Geluso are leading another study at Happy Jack Chalk mine near Scotia that is implanting PIT Tags under the skin of bats that hibernate there, mostly tricolored bats. The tiny, glass-encased microchips contain a unique code that can be read at close range, and are widely used in wildlife research and by veterinarians to identify individual animals. Readers at entrances to the mine, which has 6,000 feet of honeycombed caverns, record when bats come and go. The data they collect will help researchers better understand when the bats use the mine. They are also putting arm bands on the bats they collect at Happy Jack, and in other locations around the state, and are surprised at the low recapture rates, leaving them to wonder where else the animals could be going. Listen Up Allen and his UNL students are using another high-tech tool in bat research, acoustic recorders, to get a big-picture view of the movements and habitat selection of bats. Since 2014, they have been placing ultrasonic microphones capable of recording the echolocation calls of bats in numerous locations around the state. Using software, they can look at the frequency and shape of the calls to help identify species. One study, funded by the Nebraska Environmental Trust, has set a grid of 21 recorders that stretches roughly from Crete to Nebraska City and Leigh to Blair with the intent of learning when migratory bats arrive and leave the area. The recorders, placed on grain elevators, the observation towers at Platte River and Eugene T. Mahoney state parks and other structures, have Researchers attach a radio transmitter to a northern long-eared bat captured at Fontenelle Forest in Bellevue in 2014, part of a Game and Parks Commission-funded study to determine where the species, which was listed as threatened in 2015, was hibernating.