DAVISVILLE, Mo. - Sybill Amelon held the delicate creature in her gloved
hand.
She snipped away a spot of its fuzzy brown fur and gently glued a tiny
radio
transmitter to its back.
"I think they're very sweet bats," the biologist said before letting her
catch
wing away into the star-filled night.
For centuries, these creatures of the night have been demonized as
blood-sucking, hair-tangling, rabies-carrying vermin.
Amelon knows better. In her 27-year career with the U.S. Forest Service,
she
has learned to love their scrunched-up faces and to distinguish among
their
high-pitched calls, audible to humans only through computer enhancement.
Working at night, sleeping by day, Amelon is a "bat woman," one of a
handful of
local researchers who are helping unlock the secrets of some of the most
misunderstood creatures on the planet.
"They are so high-tech and sophisticated, and people have such horribly
maligned thoughts about them," Amelon said. "They're so beneficial to so
many
ecosystems. ... They pollinate plants, and they eat insects. They orient
by
radar. They are really, really cool."
This year, Amelon and other bat biologists hit a literal mother lode when
they
discovered the first colony of pregnant Indiana bats in the Mark Twain
National
Forest in southern Missouri. Up to 100 of the federally endangered bats
can
live together in a single tree.
Researchers contracted by the Army Corps of Engineers trapped two pregnant
Indiana bats near Wappapello Lake in May and fitted them with radio
transmitters. Amelon's team helped track one female to its summer roost
tree in
the Mark Twain forest near Greenville, Mo.
"We'd been doing surveys for six or seven years, and we'd not caught but a
couple of Indiana bats," said Jody Eberly, a biologist with the Mark Twain
National Forest. "This is the first time we've actually found Indiana bat
roost
trees on the forest, so we're pretty excited."
Like most North American bats, Indiana bats mate in the fall, then huddle
in
caves for winter hibernation. Females store the sperm until fertilization
occurs in the spring.
"Basically, they're keeping it on ice - in cold storage," Amelon said.
Already pregnant when they come out of their winter's sleep, females seek
out
the peeling bark of a shagbark hickory or a dead or dying tree. The mother
bats
squeeze under the bark to give birth and nurse their pups until the babies
can
fly on their own.
The Forest Service now has proposed amending its forest plan in order to
protect the newly discovered maternity colony. About 2,200 acres of land
in the
Brown's Hollow area of the Poplar Bluff Ranger District would be managed
to
maintain a suitable supply of trees with shaggy bark.
"Any tree removal would be done when it benefits the Indiana bat habitat,
and
it would only be done during the season when the bats aren't there," said
Becky
Bryan, a federal policy coordinator at the forest.
This recent discovery wouldn't have been possible without the time-honored
practice of bat trapping.
Amelon and her team from the Forest Service's North Central Research
Station in
Columbia, Mo., do their field work in the hot, humid months, when the bats
have
moved from their winter hibernation caves to their summer homes. From May
until
August, a bat biologist's workday begins in the early afternoon and ends
in the
wee hours of the morning.
"You're on a totally different schedule than the rest of the world,"
Amelon
said.
On a recent evening, Amelon unloaded aluminum poles from an orange bag
that she
had adorned with black sequins in the image of a bat - one of many that
decorate her home and office.
"Bat erasers, bat stuffed animals, you name it, she has it," said Jennifer
Reidy, 24, a graduate student at the University of Missouri at Columbia
from
Bastrop, Texas, who works with Amelon.
Amelon raised her first orphan bat, a big brown named Squeak, in 1998. She
has
since raised 20 to 30 more, carrying them with her wherever she goes for
three-a-day feedings.
On this bat-hunting trip, Reidy, Amelon and wildlife technician Kevin Heun
erected 10 sets of poles along Big Shoal Creek, in woods outside
Davisville,
then hung 10 walls of netting as fine as thread.
Heun set up a bat detector, a sophisticated microphone that records bats'
echolocation calls. The researchers could neither see nor hear their
quarry
darting about, but the device pulled their calls out of thin air as if it
were
a clairvoyant receiving messages from the dead. A laptop computer
displayed
patterns like musical notes correlated to the pitch of the calls, while it
generated a series of audible chirps, squeaks and trills.
Amelon watched the screen. She could tell a common red bat from an
endangered
gray bat by its call pattern, and there was definitely something rare in
the
air. She hoped to catch a gray or an Indiana bat that night, but it would
take
some luck.
"They're very smart, and very elusive," Amelon said.
Darkness fell, and still no bats had strayed into the mist nets. Then,
around
10:15, a common foraging hour, the researchers found five bats tangled in
the
nets. They carefully freed the bats and stowed each one in a cotton bag.
Amelon opened her portable laboratory in the back of a Forest Service
pickup.
With her fiery red hair tucked up under a hard hat, Amelon weighed and
measured
each bat by the light of a headlamp.
She held a red bat's tissue-thin wing up to the light and determined it
was a
juvenile, because its finger joints were still soft and thin, like the
soft
spot on a baby's skull.
"I believe he's a this-year's model," Amelon said as the 2-inch-long bat
squirmed and bared its tiny white teeth, made for munching on insect
shells.
Catch of the day
Next up: A female red bat that was still lactating, her belly full with
bugs.
"This is a tremendous insect year," Amelon said,
She surveyed a northern long-eared bat and a pair of eastern pipistrelles
that
Amelon suspected to be mother and son. When she held the baby bat aloft so
that
it could take flight, the creature fluttered and fell to the ground. Its
second
attempt to fly worked.
When Amelon checked the nets again, she found a prize - a gray bat. "We'll
radio this little girl to see where she goes," Amelon said.
The team set to work like doctors in a field hospital. Amelon clamped a
numbered metal band, like a miniature bracelet, to the bat's forearm for
later
identification. Eberly used a tiny hole-punch to take a dot of tissue from
the
bat's wing for DNA analysis.
Then Amelon trimmed the bat's fur and dabbed on white surgical glue while
Eberly selected a radio transmitter the size of a pencil eraser. When
glued in
place, the 6-inch radio antenna hung off the bat's back.
Heun prepared a portable radio receiver, which he would use to track the
bat
deep into the forest. The researchers will have about three weeks to trace
the
bat to her summer roost before the radio transmitter dies or the bat
manages to
pull it off.
Before the shift was over, the team had caught 13 bats, including two
endangered gray bats. It was a good night.
Eberly clicked off her headlamp, listening to a chorus of June bugs and
the
gurgling stream. Fireflies blinked in the treetops, camouflaged by the
brightness of the Milky Way above.
"Isn't it elegant, how it all fits together?" Eberly said. "I guess that's
the
answer to the question, 'If one bat goes extinct, who cares?'"
"I can't tell you exactly how it will affect things, but it will affect
something. There's a place for that animal. Who was it who said, 'You pull
on
one thing in the universe, and you find out everything else is
connected'?"
That was John Muir, the famous naturalist of the last century. He would
have
appreciated keeping the night watch to catch a glimpse of these
fascinating
creatures.
