Wednesday, August 21, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Tales from a
Sisters
Naturalist
by Jim Anderson
Citizen scientists
needed!
Keeping up with bats
is not an easy job. People
who study bats don9t sleep
during the normal times of
most human beings. All our
bats are nocturnal 4 local
residents as well as visitors
4 so bat people are up all
night long. Tom Rodhouse
of Bend, a regional wildlife
ecologist for the National
Park Service, is one of those
people 4 and he needs your
help.
Tom started studying
our bats back in the 2000s,
beginning at OMSI9s Camp
Hancock, then on to South
Ice Cave and Ft. Rock State
Park. He placed mist nets
in what he thought were bat
flyways and did a land-office
business live-trapping them.
He identified local bats and
those that fly in from other
locations to spend sum-
mer here pigging out on our
moths and other nocturnal
insects.
Hoary bats from down
south and several of our
local species work on moths
and mosquitoes in summer,
but desert-dwelling pal-
lid bats pretty much single
out Jerusalem crickets for
their main meal. All summer
long I receive phone calls
about piles of funny-look-
ing orange insect heads and
black legs deposited on front
porches.
Visiting the site and look-
ing at the evidence, I deter-
mined that bats had left the
mess, and one night, visiting
a site near Sisters, I observed
pallid bats coming into a
porch overhang carrying
crickets in their tail mem-
branes. They9d roost over
the doorway and proceed to
munch on the bodies, spitting
out the heads and legs.
In addition to Tom
Rodhouse, there are other
batty individuals who have
contributed to our basic
knowledge of these small
flying mammals. People like
biologist Pat Ormsbee, now
retired after a career with the
Forest Service, is a shining
example.
Pat worked for the USFS
in Eugene as a wildlife biolo-
gist and began surveying
for bats as part of her job in
about 1990. Bats intrigued
her because they9re mam-
mals that fly, echolocate, live
for decades, and their young
are called pups!
While working for the
USFS, Pat completed gradu-
ate school at Oregon State
University in 1995 and began
conducting one of the first
radio-telemetry studies of
bats in Oregon. She tracked
female long-legged bats to
their daytime roosts and
found them using big snags
and hollow trees, which was
an amazing discovery. She
taught us that the bats were
dependent on the biggest,
baddest old trees in the forest
to raise their pups.
You add that up with the
other news about the welfare
of cavity-nesting birds and
other wildlife and you know
why the USFS began placing
<Wildlife Signs= on snags, in
an effort to save them from
wood-cutters.
In 2002, Pat started the
bat grid program, and she
started knocking heads and
dragging people by the ear
to start working together
to save bats all across the
Northwest. She got over 75
state and federal agencies,
universities, NGOs, tribes,
and consultants and recruited
over 150 agency and citizen
scientists to fund and do the
monitoring of bats that was
so desperately needed to get
a pulse on bat populations.
Tom Rodhouse came out of
the woodwork to help Pat,
they became fast friends, and
have been working diligently
ever since to turn the bat
grid into what is now called
the North American Bat
Monitoring Program.
Enter Roger Rodriguez,
who Tom beckoned to town a
few years back to start up the
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Northwestern Bat Hub and
run the North American Bat
Monitoring Program out of
OSU-Cascades. Roger, Tom,
and Roger9s hired man Trent
Hawkins, and still sometimes
Pat and some OSU students
are now doing amazing
things all over the country-
side trying to get a handle
on these bats. They9ve got
Oregon Department of Fish
and Wildlife (ODFW), the
Forest Service, BLM, and all
kinds of other groups pull-
ing together to run around
and put bat detectors out on
ground.
They9re running down
the old bat grid locations and
visiting new spots to find
out what9s going on with our
bats.
Trent Hawkins is recruit-
ing and training volunteers to
help go out in the desert and
listen for spotted bats in the
Central Oregon Spotted Bat
Project. You can join in the
fun!
Spotted bats are probably
the coolest bats around, with
huge pink ears, jet black in
color with three white spots
on the back. Sometimes they
are called the Oreo cookie
bat. Or the jackass bat. Or the
death9s head bat. Depending
on how you see the pattern
when looking at their back.
Spotted bats are so shy and
solitary that Tom and the
gang really didn9t know they
were in the area until they
figured out they could hear
them calling better than catch
and record them.
They9re high flyers and
roost among sheer cliffs, but
4 unlike most other bats 4
their clicking calls can be
heard by humans while the
17
PHOTO BY JIM ANDERSON
Local NPS wildlife ecologist and bat expert Tom Rodhouse, bat study
head.
bats are flying about hunting
for moths and other noctur-
nal flying insects in the can-
yons of Central Oregon. It is
because of this audible call
that Tom and Trent decided
to start bringing citizen sci-
entists in to help.
Biologists have limited
understanding of spotted bat
distribution and seasonal
patterns in Oregon. What
they do know, however,
is that their calls are most
commonly heard near the
canyons and cliffs of east-
ern Oregon9s high desert in
places like Smith Rock.
The dates and locations
for training events are posted
on the Spotted Bat Project
site: https://osucascades.edu/
HERS/northwestern-baBat
people infot-hub/central-
oregon-spotted-bat-project.
At this training, volun-
teers will learn to distinguish
a spotted bat call from other
natural night sounds as well
as how to identify potential
high-quality spotted bat hab-
itat for their future listening
surveys.
Other topics of discus-
sion will include safety, proj-
ect logistics, and basic bat
biology and natural history.
Volunteer commitments can
be as short as a one-evening
training session and one
night of survey.
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