Weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic swept into Texas, a biologist found a dead bat covered in a white fungus — the state’s first official case of white-nose syndrome. Now, scientists are on a mission to understand how many bats have been lost.
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Nate Fuller, bat specialist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, prepares to survey the bat population in Gorman Cave at Colorado Bend State Park. “I’ve been coming here since I first came to Texas back in 2008,” Fuller said.Debbie Hicks, Texas State Park Ranger, second from right, points toward the gate that blocks people from the depths of Gorman Cave during a visit to survey the bat population.
To get that data, Fuller’s team started taking videos of bats emerging from cave myotis roosts across the state and hand-counting the small, fast mammals one by one as they emerged. In others, the bats were simply gone. Fuller said they found no bats at Government Canyon in San Antonio, which had an estimated population of 18,000 in 1995.
Pecan farmer Troy Swift said he never planned to get into bats. But after reconnecting with his old acquaintance Merlin Tuttle — a leading international bat expert — there was no going back for Swift, now the proud owner of 18 bat boxes and counting. Troy Swift, owner of Swift River Pecans and president of the Texas Pecan Board, among his award-winning pecan trees at one of his farms in Lockhart.Swift said he’s still in the experimental process — trying to figure out what types of bat boxes work best, which species of bats he’s attracting and which insects they’re eating.
There are no policies or regulatory mechanisms in place to reduce bat deaths from wind turbines. That would change if a species like the tricolored bat is added to the endangered species list, according to Sara Weaver, a senior environmental manager at Bowman Consulting.
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