City bat monitoring program aims to explore natural pest control | 24CA News

The best approach to discover a bat roosting website is to search for traces of guano — or bat droppings — beneath a bridge. Especially in the course of the summer season interval when bats are elevating their pups.

The City of Edmonton is enterprise this work with a brand new bat monitoring program this yr. It’s the primary time town has finished an official evaluation of what bats are within the metropolis, and the place. 

Initiated resulting from a shift within the metropolis’s Mosquito Control Program, the bat monitoring program might help assist species that function pure pest management.

The metropolis desires to lower pesticide use and cut back habitat appropriate for mosquitoes, mentioned Sarah McPike, senior organic sciences technologist on the metropolis’s Pest Management Lab.

A bat’s weight loss program is extra than simply mosquitoes, nonetheless.

“While bats do use mosquitoes as part of their diet and we want to help support them in continuing to eat mosquitoes, they also eat a lot of other things like beetles and some aquatic bugs and moths — things that are big and juicy,” McPike mentioned.

“So all of that helps to contribute to a healthy ecosystem and we want to help support that within the city limits.”

Nikqueta Mazur, organic science technologist on the Pest Management Lab, mentioned town is trying to see if there’s something they will do to encourage bats to be within the metropolis. One approach of doing that’s taking a look at what habitats they like.

“Currently our best way of monitoring them is to do evening exit surveys,” Mazur siad.

“We’ll go to either a bridgeside or a bat box that we want to know if it’s being used. And we will sit there in the evening for about an hour and see if we can see the bats exiting as they’re coming out to feed.”

Bats are likely to nestle themselves into tight sheltered spots. While a bridge is not a pure habitat for bats, they’re a preferred alternative for roosts. 

Bat bins are synthetic roosts, usually made out of wooden and positioned up excessive. The metropolis put in a number of of them throughout town this yr.

Cory Olson, program co-ordinator for the Alberta Bat Program, says one other approach to see how energetic an space is for bats is recording echolocation calls utilizing specialised gear.

These calls are at a frequency that can’t be heard by people and are used for navigation. The sounds that bats make that we are able to hear are the social calls.

“You can imagine that if you’re in a group with hundreds of other bats that you might get upset every now and then,” Olson mentioned. “So they emit this squeaking sound that kind of tells their roommate to back off.”

Olson mentioned if individuals bump into a bat roosting website, the most effective factor to do is depart it alone.

The bats within the metropolis are pretty wholesome in the interim, he mentioned. 

But white-nose syndrome is simply beginning to enter Alberta and should affect the province’s bat inhabitants. Guano samples will be taken for testing to find out if the fungus that causes this illness is current.

Another risk to bats within the metropolis is cats, Olson mentioned.

“The majority of the bats that get brought to wildlife rescue centres are bats that have been injured by cats. Keeping cats indoors is one of the most important things that we can do to help bats in the city.”