River Institute Monitoring Bats in Eastern Ontario

Cornwall – Thanks to grants from the Community Foundation of Ottawa and the Ontario Species at Risk Stewardship Fund, the River Institute is busy this summer gathering information to help protect declining populations of bats in Eastern Ontario. The funds will help engage youth and families from SD&G and Ottawa in survey and monitoring work to evaluate artificial bat houses as a rehabilitation tool for threatened species of bats.

Bats in eastern North America are undergoing a dramatic population decline that has been attributed to a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, but there is also evidence that the population decline may be due to loss of roosting habitat. For the past 3 years, River Institute biologist and bat expert Dr. Brian Hickey has recruited volunteers to help deploy and monitor artificial bat houses at 60 sites throughout Eastern Ontario.

This summer, students, and families at St. Laurent Academy in Ottawa will join other volunteers throughout Eastern Ontario in a widespread monitoring effort to determine bat population status, occupation rates, and reproductive success in the artificial bat houses. The results of this project will be compared with population data for Eastern Ontario, and will also be used to determine the success of artificial bat houses as a rehabilitation tool for Little Brown Bats.

Known as the River Institute's Batman, Dr. Brian Hickey is looking forward to the upcoming season. "This project has generated overwhelming community interest, and we actually have more bat houses located on private property than on public lands," he stated, "This year, we will focus on working with the volunteers to monitor levels of activity and species distributions at locations where bat houses have been deployed. This will build on our previous surveys and allow us to map population trends and assess changes in the distribution and abundance of little brown bats and other species."

In fact, the public will be able to learn more about bats and the River Institute's passion for researching and protecting bat species in eastern Ontario when Dr. Brian "Batman" Hickey presents a free family-friendly Bat Workshop on Saturday evening, July 23 (7 pm) at Cornwall's Ontario Power Generation's St. Lawrence Power Development Visitor Centre in Cornwall.

For more information visit http://www.riverinstitute.ca.