Okanagan bat watchers asked to get counting

Okanagan-based bat biologists and volunteers can soon start enjoying late nights while counting bats at maternity roosts throughout the province.

“Female bats roost together in summer and raise their young in maternity colonies,” Paula Rodriguez de la Vega, Okanagan coordinator for the BC Community Bat Program. “They generally only have one pup per female in June.”

Like many mammals, the males do not help raise the young and usually roost by themselves in large trees, rock cliffs, boulder fields, or barns and buildings.

The Annual Bat Count, which gets underway June 1, involves sitting outside a bat maternity roost at sunset, and for an hour, counting all the bats that come out of that roost.

“The maternity roosts that we count are in buildings, bat boxes, or bridges” Rodriguez de la Vega said.

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Last year, volunteers conducted 888 bat counts at 274 different maternity roost sites across the province.

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“The data collected is really important as it helps us know how the bat populations are doing in BC,” Rodriguez de la Vega said.

“We usually do four bat counts at every roost site – two in June to count just the females and two more starting mid-July when the pups are learning to fly.”

The Annual Bat Count started in 2012 and is the only long-term monitoring program focussed on bat summer roosts in B.C.

The counts help biologists monitor bat populations and track impacts or recovery of species. If populations decline, it could indicate impacts from white-nose syndrome (WNS), a fungal disease that has decimated bat populations in eastern Canada and USA. The fungus that causes WNS was detected in 2022 in the

Grand Forks region of BC, but WNS itself has not been detected yet in BC.

“A large number of the roost sites we count, house Little Brown Myotis and Yuma Myotis, both of which are susceptible to white-nose syndrome,”  Rodriguez de la Vega said.

Bats in BC are key predators of many night-flying insects.

Report a bat colony or sign up to help with bat counts at http://www.bcbats.ca, okanagan@bcbats.ca, or 1-855-922-2287 ext.13.