Building by building, counting bats in Glacier

A Montana State University senior is monitoring bats this summer at Glacier National Park. Cheyenne Stirling is the first MSU student to receive a Jerry O'Neal National Park Service Student Fellowship.

In a month and a half she inspected 400 buildings in the Park, looking for signs of bats. Possible signs are actual bats, feces, noises or an opening that would appeal to a roosting bat. The buildings could be anything from an outhouse to the Many Glacier Hotel.

One building will have quite a few and next door will have none, she said. She noticed that industrial garages have lots of bats, but was also surprised to find bats roosting under tin roofs. One time, a baby bat slid off the tin roof at her, in broad daylight, so she put it back on a tree and hoped for the best.

Stirling is collecting data that will help the Glacier prepare for the possible arrival of white-nose syndrome.

A cold-loving fungus that spreads between bats as they hibernate causes the syndrome, said park biologist Lisa Bate. The fungus invades the bats' tissue causing the bat to starve or freeze to death. The disease came to the United States from Europe and is spreading west. The closest cases to Montana are in Minnesota and Oklahoma.

The fungus killed more than 5.7 million bats so far in North America, leading to uneaten insects that threaten crops.

There's no cure yet for white-nose syndrome, but some hope exists. The U.S. Forest Service treated some infected bats with a bacterium that combats the fungus over the winter and they survived. Researchers are still looking into further treatments and trying to understand the disease.

The Park is known to have nine bat species. The little brown bat is most likely to roost in human-made structures and most likely to contract the disease, Bate said. The Little brown bat is now a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act. It is already endangered in Canada.

If the syndrome does infect bats in the Park, biologists want to be able to track the impact of the disease.

Stirling's work this summer is focused on building assessments during the day, but her effort is just the start of ongoing bat observation in Glacier.

"We can't get an accurate count by just looking at the buildings," Bate said.

Stirling counted only 25 bats during the day at a building in St. Mary. To get a more accurate count, Stirling conducted an emergence count. She sat in a lawn chair after dusk with a button in her hand and clicked it each time she saw a bat leave the roost. She counted over 900 bats in only 45 minutes.

Currently, they don't have the funding and resources to do more emergence counts.

Knowing how many bats are in each building and how those numbers change annually would be useful, Bate said.

The Park has many historical buildings that are over 50 years old that need maintenance and remodeling. They function as bat habitat, because as the buildings age they develop nooks and crannies, which make good bat habitat.

Before maintenance can occur, biologists inspect the buildings.

At the end of Stirling's fellowship, she'll have inspected some 600 buildings. Even so, it's only two-thirds of the buildings in the Park.

The next step is to compile the data she has and do a thorough analysis.

"I'm excited to go back to school and analyze the data," she said.