The Moran State Park manager now has his own custom-built Bat Cave equipped with a state of the art infrared bat-cam, and even a robin standing watch outside.
But before you go imagining Jim Schuh zooming along in a glossy black Bat-mobile, endangering the local wildlife – the new building is an experimental bat nursery designed for birthing and nursing baby bats.
A colony of 50 to 150 rare, Long-Eared Myotis bats has been raising its pups in the rafters of the 75-year old park manager’s office for years now.
“This is a rare bat,” said Kwiáht director Russel Barsh. “Even a small colony is a big deal!”
Although park management has a suitable appreciation for their bat colony, Schuh said “In the summer months when they’re in full nursing capacity, the smell of the bat guano can be a little overpowering… We’re trying to make a more suitable nursery for them where they’re not going to have the disturbance of people coming in and out.” Not to mention that occasionally a stray bat will slip down from the attic and go winging its way around inside the park office.
The park has tried caulking the chinks in the historic log building, and is now re-shingling the roof in hopes of encouraging the bats elsewhere. So the Friends of Moran State Park and Lopez-based conservation laboratory Kwiáht collaborated to build the bats a new home, the first bat maternity colony house in the San Juan Islands.
“We’re hoping to take some of the guano from upstairs and put it in there,” said Schuh. “Anything we can do to make it feel like home for them.”
Nine bat species have been reported in San Juan county since 1940; Kwiáht has positively identified three species and is hoping to find more. Myotis literally means “mouse-ear” in Greek; the Long-Eared Myotis has distinct large black ears measuring up to 3/4” long on its tiny body. The bats have soft brown fur and typically weigh 5-10 g, at 84 mm long. A friend of fruit growers, they feast on beetles and the codling moths that munch fruit trees, as well as other insects like mosquitos, termites and wasps. Barsh said the coolest thing about these bats is their unique hunting method: they can turn off their own echolocation clicks and hover silently over open water or vegetation, listening for the flutter of moth wings.
As most published “bat house” designs are too small for maternity colonies, Kwiáht recommended a larger shed-on-stilts design, the ceiling lined with closely spaced wooden baffles to create cozy bat-snuggling cavities. Friends of Moran State Park adopted the project, Schuh located the materials, and Orcas Island High School science teacher Greg Books developed the construction plan and built the structure with volunteer support from Dan and Michel Vekved, Mark Morris, Linda Sheridan, and Russel Barsh. Kwiáht even donated and installed an infrared digital video camera to unobtrusively monitor the bats’ activity; an interpretive kiosk with live “bat-cam” is planned for the future.
The house is an experimental prototype for situations in which old buildings cannot be saved and the resident bats, some of the county’s rarest and least studied mammals, must be offered alternative habitat nearby. Female bats return to the same locations each spring to form maternity colonies, congregating to give birth and nurse their young together. Colonies may support hundreds to thousands of bats that spend the rest of the year living in smaller groups, roosting in rock crevices or beneath the exfoliating bark of trees.
“All of the bats in the islands may depend on fewer than 25 maternity colonies,” explains Barsh. “This makes it important to locate and protect those sites, and we’ve only just begun.”
Barsh said old barns, cabins, and rustic log structures may be homes for bat colonies, based on his recent re-discovery of a colony of rare Townsend’s Big-Eared Bats in a San Juan Island barn. Kwiáht has developed a countywide “Bats and Barns” program with the historic preservation association Friends of 100 Old Island Barns in order to help landowners maintain old structures without dislodging bat colonies.
“All Myotis maternity colonies are classified as ‘priority habitats’ by Washington State’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Myotis evotis is also a federally listed ‘species of concern’… deliberately destroying Myotis colonies could have legal consequences,” said Barsh.
Kwiáht welcomes inquiries about bat conservation in the islands, and asks that islanders bag and freeze dead bats for identification and genetic archiving. For help with injured, confused or trapped bats, call Wolf Hollow Wildlife Rehabilitation Center (378-5000), which will rescue the animal and share data with Kwiáht.
For information on Kwiáht, see http://www.kwiht.org/ or email Russel Barsh at rlbarsh@gmail.com.
For more information on Friends of 100 Old Island Barns, contact Boyd Pratt at mulnocove@rockisland.com, or Sandy Strehlou at sstrehlou@fridayharbor.org
