My Project at Mt Rainier

17 Jun My Project at Mt Rainier

My main project that I am going to be doing at Mt. Rainier National Park is guano collection, emergencies counts data, and contacting staff from other parks in the Pacific Northwest that are collecting guano and emergence counts data. 

To complete guano counts we set up a plastic sheet under a bat box or area that we know bats like to hang out during the day time. This can be a shed or building that we know that bat use doing the day time.  We collect as much guano as we can from different areas of the sheet because bats with white nose syndrome are not just going to defecate in one area they are going to be spread out in the box that they are staying at.

For emergencies counts, we visit bat colonies and wait for little before sun down to complete a count of how many bats leave the colony to go get food. After it gets too dark for us to see the bats at the larger colony and five minutes after we seen that last bats at some of the smaller colony’s, we tally up all the data from around the site and average out how many bats we counted. We also create an average of how many bats we didn’t see that will eventually emerge later.