Working in the Dark

05 Jun Working in the Dark

My site is like other towns in the Mt Rainer National Park. We have bat boxes on building and structures all across the park major town and buildings. We also set up data recorders in a lot of different areas in are park. We have them facing open spaces where we think that the bats are feeding. We are also working with a lot of other parks in the northwest. Some of the parks include the North Cascades, San Juan Islands, and Hoh National Rainforest.

At the each of these sites we are completing emergences counts or catching bats to see if they have any signs of white nose syndrome. Usually these two things happen when the sun goes down until we see that last bat. If we are processing for white nose syndrome, we stay up pretty late to collect all of the data that we need.

Another part of the job is the travel time to all these sites each are a little over 3-5 hours away so we spend a lot of time on the road. We also spend a lot of time going though data that has been recently collect during the winter session.