06/10/2022
Wildlife Specialists provides ecological expertise and services to a diverse client base, ranging from national parks, military bases, state land managers, energy developers, land trusts, and private landowners. Our specialists also serve as expert witnesses to clarify wildlife issues in legal settings.
Bats are a group of animals that are highly specialized and unique, but that have experienced significant population declines recently due to a fungal stressor (White Nose Syndrome), and are considered a high conservation priority across North America. Wildlife Specialists has extensive experience in bat surveys and conservation, and has recently been mobilized on several contracts related to bat conservation. One is with the US Forest Service, where we are completing the construction and delivery of a bat condo. This condo is a structure four feet square that will be elevated eight feet above the ground, with wooden baffles inside for the bats to hang from as they roost. Bat condos are important to provide safe summer maternity sites for large groups of bats that previously may have taken up residence in an attic of a house or old building. As old buildings are restored or replaced, the number of suitable roost sites declines, and it really is not beneficial to have them coexisting with people in the same structures. Bat condos also can be erected in sites where they can be used as interpretive focal points to teach people about bats and allow visitors a safe place to view the bats as they head out to forage each evening in the summer.
The other larger contract is to provide an unnamed client with bat mist-netting surveys along a linear energy project spanning several states in the central part of the country including parts of Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky as well as a separate project in Iowa. These surveys involve our qualified bat surveyors (QBS) finding suitable sites, setting up mist nets, then watching the nets all night to remove captured bats. The bats fly into the nets and are entangled, then are removed, identified, measured, and released. If the captured bat is of special concern, often they are outfitted with radio transmitters and tracked to their summer roost location, to verify that the proposed project will not negatively impact the bats. This project is an example of how Dark Pulse subsidiary Wildlife Specialists supports clients in different phases of a development project, from initial scoping, through permitting and construction, and into long-term monitoring.
