[Maine-birds] Re: Bats

I posted this on another board, but thought I'd include it here as well. I have had a fair amount of success recording bats in the Belgrade Lakes region and even picked up recordings of Little Brown Bat. There are likely many fewer bats in the area than in years past, but they are still out there. We've got to be vigilant about researching and protecting bat species if we want to prevent further population declines. 

I've been interested in bat conservation for the last fews and have had the pleasure of working on a few projects in which I was surveying bats with acoustic detectors. I've installed stationary detectors and driving transects with a detector affixed to my car. While the data collected in this project is no-doubt valuable, its collection is not something many citizens would take on. This year, however, I started working on a project in partnership with UMaine, Maine IFW, and Maine Audubon that aims to study bats through a citizen science network. I think it shows real promise. In this project (BatME), citizen scientists around the state would be supplied with detectors compatible with iOS devices. With these user-friendly detectors in hand, the citizen will have to power to conduct surveys whenever (at sunset) and wherever they wish. Best of all, the associated application has a live feed spectrogram, lowers the echolocating calls of bats to an audible frequency, and has fairly accurate identification software. The calls are recorded and GPS coordinates logged. 

I've conducted more than a dozen surveys with this detector in various habitat and recorded the calls of six (out of eight) of Maine bat species. I've been really impressed with the detector and have high hopes for the project. We're primed to gain a lot of data on our local bat populations. We will be working on the logistics of a statewide monitoring project later this year. 

MPBN covered the project last month. Click the link below to read the article or give it a listen:

http://news.mpbn.net/post/volunteers-count-bats-maine-effort-save-them

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