Well Wisconsin Radio

Disclaimer:

The information in this podcast does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It should not be used as a substitution for healthcare from a licensed healthcare professional. Consult with your healthcare provider for individualized treatment or before beginning any new program.

Transcript:

Interviewer: Hello, and welcome to Well Wisconsin Radio, a podcast discussing health and well-being topics with experts from all around the state of Wisconsin. I’m your host, Katie Lovell, and today my guest is Jennifer Redell. Jennifer is a bat biologist and cave and mine specialist at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Since 2001, she has been crawling through muddy caves, paddling water-filled mines, and rappelling into dark crevices in search of Wisconsin’s threatened cave bat population and teaching others about their subterranean homes. Jennifer and her colleagues work statewide to monitor and assess the bat population trends through acoustic surveys, hibernacula surveys, and summer roost monitoring. Thank you for being here with us today, Jennifer.

Guest: Thanks for having me.

Interviewer: So, to start us off, could you share a bit about what drew you to this field and what your day-to-day work looks like as a bat biologist?

Guest: Yeah. I was always a nature kid, and so I always was aware of bats flying at dusk. But I was first drawn to bats in college when I was working in caves and as a caver because bats were just hanging there in total darkness underground in perfect silence and stillness. And it had taken me crawling and squeezing in discomfort into these underground spaces, a place I wouldn’t want to spend more than a few hours, and yet here they were occupied by bats for maybe six or seven long months out of each year. And the bats were so tiny and vulnerable and so approachable. You could get right up close and look at every little detail from their little miniature toes gripping the rock to the little beads of moisture or dew condensed on their fur. Made them look like little sparkly disco balls when your headlamp shines on them. So, it was this special experience. And then when white-nose syndrome arrived in North America in 2007, natural resources agencies soon began hiring more biologists to investigate and learn about bats in their states. And I was working with the DNR in Wisconsin state parks, but I soon changed positions, and my formal bat career began. So, I started cataloging Wisconsin’s caves and mines for our endangered resources program. Because we needed to know where our bats were and how many we had here before that disease arrived. And as far as our work goes, a conservation biologist, whether we’re working with bats or other species, we want to know where those animals are and how they’re doing now so that we can compare any changes that occur over time. And a core of our work is in the word conservation. And that’s a word that has to do with humans and our interaction with the natural world. So, a big part of our work is knowing what threats animals face and then what we as people can practically do to reduce the threats and basically to keep our Wisconsin bat species around as long as possible. And we answer questions from the public, we provide guiding information for industry and our conservation partners, and we help find practical solutions to problems. And keeping bats around is important for many reasons because, as we’ll talk about today, bats can be beneficial to people even if the work that the bats do is often unseen and undervalued. And I’m lucky that I get to work in this field because I love it. I get to enter these very fragile cave habitats and see our industrial past underground in these extensive mines where the bats are hibernating. We work in winter doing surveys of bats in those sites. And the work is not always easy or convenient. Bats are nocturnal, so as biologists, we’re frequently up at night if it’s the summertime. That’s when bats are active. And so, we might be out recording echolocation calls or trapping bats as they emerge in the evening from their roost. And then essentially bats are getting a checkup from us. We’re weighing and measuring, recording data, and then we are often tagging those individuals. And tagging the animal can help us track that animal over space and time. And so, we’re really starting to learn not only which bats are surviving and how and where, but how they’re moving and interacting with Wisconsin’s landscape, and that’s exciting new information. And it’s important, I guess, as we continue today, for people to know that when I say the word bats, I’m talking about this whole group of animals. There are over 1,500 species of bats worldwide. But here in Wisconsin, we have just eight species. And the most encountered bat is the little brown bat. And so normally when we are referring to some of the studies and things on bats locally, we’re mostly talking about little brown bats. But, every species is unique. They all have different annual cycles. They all prefer different diets and have different life habits and habitats that they interact with. So, the other thing that I want to mention is that in Wisconsin we are home to nearly half of the little brown bats that we know of in the nation. And those many tens of thousands of bats hibernate here each winter in just three different mines. So as Wisconsinites and working for Bats of Wisconsin, we’ve got an awesome opportunity and a big responsibility.

Interviewer: Wow, that’s amazing. That’s a lot in your day-to-day.

Guest: It is.

Interviewer: But it sounds very interesting and very cool, and you seem very passionate about it.

Guest: Yeah, for sure.

Interviewer: So, when we look at a typical Wisconsin corn or soybean field at night, what is happening overhead, and how do these bat colonies interact with our agricultural landscape?

Guest: Yeah. Bats are mammals, and they’re the only mammals capable of sustained or powered flight. And because of that, even though their bodies are well-designed for flight and they’re very agile and efficient, flight is still very energy expensive, especially so for bat moms. If they’ve got a baby, a pup, that baby was nearly a third of the mom’s body weight when it was born. And then mom is having to– She’s a mammal. She’s nursing her baby as she returns from nighttime foraging. So, she’s going to eat a lot of insects. All our Wisconsin bats are insectivorous. And she might even need to feed up to half her body weight on insects each night. So, as she’s emerging, she’s going out and capturing insects. She might eat up to 1,000 mosquito-sized insects per hour when she’s out foraging. And eating up to half your body weight or your body weight is a lot. I mean, imagine a human doing that. You might be eating 600 quarter-pound cheeseburgers in a night, and then doing it again the next night. So, when bats emerge, they’re using echolocation calls. They’re bouncing sound off objects and their insect prey, and they are chasing those insects down, and then they are often reaching out with their– They have a hand wing. They have all the same fingers that we have and the dexterous movement and jointed fingers. But they have this skin membrane that allows them to fly with that hand wing, and they’ll reach out with the hand wing and grab the insect and bring it to their mouth. Sometimes they’ll bite that insect out of the air. But they’re very efficient hunters, and so their diets again, are species-dependent, but when we’re talking about little brown bats, their diet will vary according to what’s out there flying around, what’s recently hatched, and we know that they’ll vary that diet throughout the summer. And then thanks to some work by Amy Ray at UW-Madison several years ago, she did a DNA analysis of bat poop, bat guano, to find out what bats are eating. So, we know that our little and big brown bats in Wisconsin are eating at least 24 different types of agricultural pests. And so, they’re really benefiting our farmers, and that includes things like corn borer and cutworm moth and cucumber beetle and grasshoppers.

Interviewer: That’s amazing. And that study, I mean, kudos to Amy. So, for those who might not be familiar, what is white-nose syndrome and what kind of impact has it had on our local bat populations?

Guest: Yeah, I mentioned this earlier, and it’s been such a major threat to bats across North America, particularly hibernating species. We have 47 species of bats in North America, and about half of them hibernate. So, this is a disease that only affects bats that hibernate in the cave or mine where they’re going to hibernate, where it’s cool and dark. And there’s a cold-loving fungus that grows on bats’ skin. It invades the living skin tissue, and causes lesions or damage, to the bat’s wings and other skin membranes. So, the disease is called white-nose syndrome because this fungus shows up sometimes on the face and looks like white mold. And basically, it causes the bats to burn through their fat reserves too quickly, and long before winter’s over, they have used up all their energy stores, and they end up starving to death. That was many years ago when we were hearing about white-nose syndrome at first, and then it was arriving in Wisconsin in 2014. And like in other areas where this disease has been, we saw over the first few years after arrival of the disease this very steep decline in hibernating bat populations where we lost 90% of bats across our various hibernation sites. Primarily little brown bats, but all four of our hibernators. And since that time, and this is the case with any pressure on animal populations in nature, we’ve seen either the populations stabilize at either very low numbers or almost no bats in certain caves and mines. But luckily, we’ve had some recovery at our three big little brown bat hibernation sites. So, even though we lost most bats there, since 2021, we’ve seen steady population increases and growth again for little brown bats at the big three sites. So, that’s not happening across the United States. That’s something that’s unique here in Wisconsin, and there’s also a few sites in New York State and on the East Coast where that has been the case where there’s some recovery. So, it’s kind of mixed news. Not all species fared well. Not all species are recovering, but at a select few sites and very important sites in Wisconsin, our little brown bats seem to be doing okay.

Interviewer: Well, that’s great news that we’re seeing some type of recovery at least.

Guest: Yeah.

Interviewer: If we look at a scenario where these bat populations decline significantly, how does that change things for local farmers and their pest management strategies?

Guest: Yeah. Farmers have probably been relying on the unseen help of bats. But in 2012, so before white-nose syndrome began to have a serious impact in the Midwest, USGS looked at the acres of harvestable cropland in the United States. And they broke this down by county and state, and calculated the value that bats were providing for farmers in terms of both pesticide application and pesticide costs. And the value of bats was calculated at $3.7 billion nationally, and then in Wisconsin it was $365 million to $1.5 billion of bat value. And, since white-nose syndrome has arrived in Wisconsin, affected our bat populations, and then unfortunately, continued to march its way westward and is now found affecting bats coast to coast. It’s been a bit difficult to measure the impact that the disease has had. And one of the reasons, and we often say this when talking about bats in Wisconsin, is that bats, because they’ve historically been misunderstood, have also been underfunded and understudied. So, there wasn’t a lot of research looking at the impact of bats on agriculture prior to white-nose syndrome. And it’s been hard to tease out what has happened since. But there is an interesting study that took place about 15 years ago in Illinois. Where the researcher took huge corn fields and actually set up screen or cage enclosures to keep bats off of the corn crops. And after examining the crops after several months, the plots where the bats were not able to access the crops had 60% more corn earworm, and the damage to that corn crop was about 50 times higher than corn fields where the bats were allowed to be present. So, we can sort of imagine what the absence of bats or far fewer bats is doing to our ag systems.

Interviewer: Yeah, definitely. Those numbers are large.

Guest: Yeah. And of course, the natural result is that more pesticides have probably been applied to our crops as a result.

Interviewer: Well, we kind of covered this already, but what are the broader economic stakes here when it comes to those crop yields and our dairy industry?

Guest: Yeah. I don’t know of studies that are directly linked to the dairy industry and bats. But one of the outcomes of the Illinois study is that scientists found that the presence of bats even reduced the fungus that was affecting corn crops. So, even though bats are not eating fungus, there was something to do with the corn susceptibility to fungus. And then those researchers estimated that bats were saving more than $850 million to $1.5 billion to the corn industry alone in the US every year. And there have been, as I mentioned, some challenges to trying to quantify the impact that the loss of bats has had.

Interviewer: Yeah. I find that so interesting, that bats are doing all of this for our agriculture.

Guest: Yeah. They’ve sometimes been referred to as the invisible mammal.

Interviewer: So, beyond the farms, what role do bats play in the broader ecosystem regarding human health and disease prevention?

Guest: Okay. Well, bats are one of the primary predators of our night-flying insects in Wisconsin. And in addition to ag pests and then of course the tie-ins with the human food system, bats are eating at least 17 types of mosquitoes, and that’s in our state alone. I didn’t even know we had 17 types of mosquitoes until this study came out. And that includes the species that carry human diseases like West Nile virus. So, the work that we do as bat conservationists is sort of part of this approach known as One Health. And it recognizes that the health of people is closely connected to the health of animals and our shared environment. And so, we work at this intersection of human-bat and ecosystem health. We often think about bat-human interactions, and the thing that often comes to mind is rabies, particularly in our part of the world. And most bats, will never come into contact with humans, and pose no risk of transmitting disease, including rabies. And instead, the 1,500 species of bats that make up this second largest group of mammals on the planet is playing this vital ecological role. They’re eating destructive insects. In other parts of the world, they’re pollinating plants and dispersing seeds. But we know that bats can carry viruses. All animals and humans too can carry viruses. And, a big part of those then diseases spilling over into humans often has to do with human populations encroaching on wildlife habitat. And that’s typically in other parts of the world. However, when we think of humans altering the environment, so increasing buildings and cutting down dead trees or eliminating forest habitat, or excluding bats from old barns or buildings, bats then might be more enticed to take up residence in human dwellings and close to us. So that forces more human and bat contact. And bats by nature are shy, they’re gentle, they’re not aggressive. And if you encounter one, it’s hopefully easy to avoid handling it. And if necessary, you can follow proper precautions, not directly touching the animal if you need to remove it from a living space, for example. And most people are familiar with the risk of bats and rabies. Of the bats turned in for rabies testing or submitted for rabies testing, so that is bats seen during daylight, perhaps on the ground or encountered in a living space, about 5% test positive for rabies. And it’s important, obviously, that if people have any type of direct bite or scratch, that they’re in contact with their healthcare provider. Rabies is 100% treatable if caught quickly. It’s of course nothing to mess around with. And if the bat itself can be captured, it can be tested for that disease. So that’s important for people to know. But, by following good practices like, receiving proper vaccinations, and getting health advice from your doctor and then also respecting wildlife, not handling it or coming into contact, if you can avoid it, we can sort of minimize the risk of living in close contact with bats. And protecting bats where they sleep and offering them alternative habitat, like putting up a bat house, is a way to help keep the bat population healthy and ensure that we have fewer bat-human interactions. So, we can really kind of safeguard population health and biodiversity and invest in a healthier and more sustainable future when we think of this concept of One Health and looking at all aspects. And all connections.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you so much for those tips. I think that will help our listeners better understand the bat population and work with them and not against them.

Guest: Yeah. I think one thing that we often receive calls about are bats on the ground, and especially that happens in midsummer, and that’s right after baby bats are just learning to fly. So, just because you see a bat out in daylight or on the ground or roosting on a wall doesn’t necessarily mean it’s sick. Again, best not to handle it and to leave it alone, but there are many reasons a bat might be out during daytime.

Interviewer: And now we’ll take a quick break to hear about some of Well Wisconsin’s program offerings.

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Interviewer: And now we’ll head back to the Well Wisconsin Radio interview.

All right, so we’re going to kind of shift gears and talk about the Wisconsin Bat Program. Can you tell us what community participation in this program looks like?

Guest: Yeah. There are three of us that make up the bat program. And we can’t be with all the bats everywhere in Wisconsin every night, so we really rely on the eyes and feet and ears of citizens to help us gather data and learn things about our bats. And we also have people that get trained to do bat outreach and education and participate that way. So, one way that people participate is if they have an occupied bat house or bats roosting in a barn or building on their property they stand outside about 30 minutes after sunset on a summer night, and they count the bats as they emerge from the roost. It’s easy to do. It takes about 20 minutes or half an hour. And we try to do it at least twice per summer, encourage people to do two different weekends, one in June, when just the mother bats are dropping out of that roost. And then later in July, when if each mother has had one baby, her pup is now flying, and so that count should double. And it really helps us keep track of how bats are reproducing, how the population is doing, whether it’s growing or not, and that data is important to us. So, people submit the counts online, and that’s something that anyone with an active bat colony can do. And then we also train folks to use acoustic detectors, and we use a rather expensive kind to do our official monitoring surveys. But bat detectors have also become far more affordable, and there’s plug-in types that go into your smartphone, and you can just do it for enjoyment. You can get a bat detector and use an app to identify bat calls as you walk around your yard or neighborhood or park. But when we train our volunteers, they have special equipment, or are trained to use their own bat detector, and they walk or they paddle or they drive with this special microphone, and they record bat calls. And bats, of course, are echolocating all the time as they’re out foraging at night, and each species produces a different sound. Just like you can go listen to birds and tell who is calling if you’re a good birder by ear, we can record those bat calls and then a software program and manual vetting allows us to see which species were encountered by the surveyor. And then we’re getting a sense of which species are out there, so diversity in a certain area, abundance, and changes over time. And then, the other way that people participate is to learn about bats. We partner with the Wisconsin Master Naturalist Program and have a Wisconsin Bat Ambassador training that about 125 people have participated in at this point, and they’re scattered all over the state. And, when we get requests from schools and scouts and parks and other community organizations for bat talks and bat walks, we often put folks in touch with one of them.

Interviewer: Wow, that’s amazing. There’s a lot that the community can do to participate in this. So, bat monitoring involves a lot of observation and listening, as we have discussed. Are there mental benefits associated with slowing down and listening to echolocation?

Guest: I don’t know of any studies that have been done on that, but what I can say is that personally, and just from interacting with lots of volunteers who do this, people talk about it helping them to pay closer attention to nature and become more aware of their surroundings when they’re observing and listening to bats. So, people describe doing their roost count as a little bit like meditation. You’re very focused on this one small visual area as you’re standing outside at night, enjoying the breeze, perhaps trying to focus and exclude mosquitoes. Always a good time for meditative practice with that and accepting things as they are. But people also describe enjoying the movement activity of walking a bat acoustic survey or paddling a bat acoustic survey. And they enjoy the peacefulness, especially of paddling lake or water routes at night. They’re in a canoe or kayak under the moonlight, the starlight, the fireflies are all around. They’re listening to bat calls with the help of this bat detector, and then often having surprise wildlife encounters along the way. The splash of a beaver tail or startling another bird or animal. And then I would also say that volunteers appreciate connecting with others over discussions and sharing about bats. Because, we often say, hopefully, if you reach out and are chatting about bats with one of us, we’re not saying you have to love bats if you fear them or would prefer to avoid them, but we hope that you’ll appreciate them once you learn more or have some more exposure to them. And so our bat ambassadors enjoy connecting with others and sharing stories and helping to interpret bat behavior for the public.

Interviewer: Awesome. Thank you for all of that. I feel like it would be very beneficial to just canoe or kayak and, like you said, describe the things you’re hearing and seeing, and how it can be almost a meditative state as well.

Guest: Yeah. We think about forest bathing, and this is sort of moonlight bathing. But also getting some activity at the same time, getting our steps or pulls on the paddle.

Interviewer: Yes, definitely. So, I know we’ve talked about this kind of in our interview already, but bats are often misunderstood. How does actively participating in monitoring projects tend to change people’s perceptions or even fears of these creatures?

Guest: Yeah. I would say there are people with bats roosting on their property, and through conversations and then experiences with roost counting, they’ve gone from wanting to avoid their bats and get rid of them to really appreciating having them there. And again, in learning about them and watching them in a more controlled setting, have learned to find the beauty in those animals. So often, fears are frequently passed down from caregivers. And so, it’s something that, fear is fear, and we want to respect that. And people have sometimes had surprise encounters where the bat is in a closed-in living space and flying frantically trying to get away from the big, scary human that’s near it. Bats are little, so they’ll often stretch out their wings and bare their teeth to try to act big and scary. But of course, they’re extremely vulnerable, which is why they’re out under cover of darkness trying to hide from predators and trying to hide during the day, maybe in your patio umbrella or behind your shutters or up in that bat house. And so yeah, they’re often a surprise, and we find that when people do get to have more exposure to them through photographs or video or just up close in person, but in a controlled way, like I was describing at the beginning, bats tend to hold very still and conserve their energy most of the time. Most of the time they’re not flying. And so when people get to see that up close, a lot of folks describe them as cute and fall in love with their tininess and vulnerability.

Interviewer: I personally I don’t want to say have the fear of bats, but I have never experienced them. So, getting out and experiencing them would maybe change my perception as well.

Guest: And as long as you can appreciate their benefits and appreciate the place that they exist in, that’s the important part.

Interviewer: Definitely. So, in what ways does getting involved with bat monitoring contribute to a person’s physical well-being?

Guest: Well, people get their steps in, and they get their paddling in if they’re doing active surveys with us. But as I was saying, I think it’s mostly for folks who are already enjoying being outside and being in nature, and all the mental health benefits that go along with that. Whether it’s relaxation or just sensory stimulation. Those are the things that volunteers describe. And I don’t know of any studies, unfortunately, that have been conducted on bats and mental health or physical well-being or bat monitoring and well-being.

Interviewer: Yeah. Well, it sounds like people get out and explore and get to see the great state of Wisconsin while they’re helping.

Guest: They do. We have 350 lake and river routes all waiting for someone to paddle them under the moonlight.

Interviewer: You make it sound so awesome.

Guest: It is. We don’t want folks to go out alone at night, so you’re encouraged to bring some friends or family members or a loved one. So, it’s a really beautiful way to experience the night and to get to uncover this little mystery of who’s flying above your heads in the dark. Even though you can’t see them, you can hear them chattering away with the help of a bat detector.

Interviewer: That’s so cool. If our listeners want to learn more, get involved, or even volunteer with the Wisconsin Bat Program, where should they start?

Guest: Yeah. You can go to the Wisconsin DNR website and just search bats, and you can get connected with Paul, Heather, or myself, Jennifer, the three bat biologists with this program. And we can help you get aligned with the right volunteering for your interests. But for anybody listening who wants to just be supportive of bats and help bats out, or learn more, we have many resources on the website. So, you can point friends and family to the website if they’ve got common bat questions, like how to get bats out of an attic or out from behind shutters if they’re not wanted there. If you’re inspired to build a bat house, you can find bat house building and placement plans on our website. And then, we encourage people to do some basic activities to support bats. One is you can plant native plants because they’re supporting our native insect population, and that’s what our bats are eating. So, that’s a great action for all wildlife, not just bats. And you can also donate directly to our program by visiting our website. If you purchase an endangered resources license plate or do the endangered resources tax checkoff, that’s a way to directly support our work. Or a direct donation as well. And then if you do have bats roosting near you, we would love it if you would consider counting them and reporting the bat emergence count online. And so, you can get in touch with us via the website as well.

Interviewer: Well, wonderful. Thank you so much for being here with us today, Jennifer. We’ve learned a lot, and we just appreciate your time.

Guest: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s always good to share information about our wonderful night flyers.

Interviewer: Thanks for listening to Well Wisconsin Radio. I hope you enjoyed the show. We love hearing from our community, so please take a moment to visit the Well Wisconsin Radio card under the Benefits tab in your Well Wisconsin portal to share your feedback or suggest a guest for a future episode. You can find our transcripts and previous episodes all at www.webmdhealthservices.com/wellwisconsinradio. If you’re listening to this podcast on your platform of choice, be sure to subscribe so you can never miss an episode.

• Talk to a health coach individually or sign up for group coaching today by calling 800-821-6591.
• Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
• Wisconsin Bat Program