Saturday, August 9, 2014

Annual Bat Count

Ebola in Africa, Gaza, the Ukraine, ISIS in Iraq, children at the border—the list of issues is long and depressing.  Tonight , however, I have a tiny bit of good news.

Every year for the past 20 years I’ve been counting bats for the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s annual statewide bat census.  In past years we’ve counted hundreds, but for the last two years we were down to two and then four.  White nose syndrome had wiped out almost our entire population.

This evening we counted 20 bats emerging from our bat house on the side of the shed.  This is promising; it means that some of the bats must be developing an immunity to the syndrome.  


I know this isn’t earthshaking news in the global context, but it made me feel good nonetheless.

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