Over this past spring and summer, more than a thousand people worked with the government-funded Community Bat Programs of BC to conduct a count at more than 300 roosts.
It’s dusk at the old schoolhouse. Volunteers are arriving, prepared for a show. Someone puts out homemade cookies and fudge. Others park themselves in lawn chairs.Hundreds of little brown bats have taken flight. In search of an evening meal, they are launching themselves from roosts arrayed around the schoolhouse, which now serves as the North Oyster Community Centre in Ladysmith, B.C.
Since 2012, this grassroots surveillance has offered the best window into how these animals are grappling with a variety of modern pressures, including pesticides that kill off vast numbers of their prey. This network of volunteers is also B.C.’s early warning system against white nose syndrome, a disease that is destroying millions of these insectivores further down the West Coast, across the Rockies and all over North America.
“In Canada they’re so incredibly important because they eat so many nocturnal insects: they eat not only mosquitoes, but they also eat a lot of agricultural pests – a lot of moths and beetles that eat agricultural crops. They also eat a lot of forestry pests,” Ms. Rodriguez de la Vega says in a phone interview from her home in Penticton, B.C.
As the season turns, bats will leave their summer roosts to seek out deeper, darker crevasses for the winter. Caves and abandoned mines offer the animals the ideal temperature and humidity for hibernacula – the hiding spots where they sleep until their prey begins reappearing, months later.
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