Ok, so here is some more information about processing the bats, because I am sure you are curious about why I am out here in Texas! I mentioned that we band the bats, but we do not do this to all the bats we collect. The bats we are catching weigh anywhere between 10-15 grams, a few pregnant females we caught last night weighed about 17 grams. The wing band is only about 0.5 grams, but we don’t want to burden the pregnant or lactating females since they are already expending more energy than normal. Therefore, we only band males and non-reproductive females. Banding allows us to keep track of the bat in case we happen to catch again. This actually happened last night. We caught a female that Liz had banded last year. We take guano samples to analyze back in the lab for the DNA of pecan nut casebearer moths (PNC), which are the pests eating the pecans in the orchards. If we find this DNA, we know the bats are eating the PNC and providing agricultural benefits for the landowners. The wing punches allow us to take a small sample of the wing to get DNA from the bat. When we release the bat we take a record of their call with an Anabat recorder. This way we have a collection of calls and we know which species they came from. This is useful because we also have Anabat recorders set up in various orchards and they record all through the night, but we don’t know which bat is producing the calls. But, if we go back to our database of collected calls from the processing we can look at the different frequencies associated with a specific species and determine which species have been flying around in those other orchards. So that is a little bit more about what I am doing at night.
During the day, I wash bat bags that were used the previous night, repair mist-nets, check the Anabats in the other fields and replace there batteries and compact flash cards (CFC), check traps for PNC, and collect bug samples. I have also been in charge of cooking dinner quite frequently, which is an interesting task since we only have a camping stove. John actually brought over a small grill the other day, so I now have more to work with. We don’t have a laundry machine or a dryer and I do all my laundry by hand and hang it outside on a clothes line. Liz told me to use the outdoor sink in the back yard for my laundry. It seemed to work well except today I walked out to clean some bat bags back there and blood was dripping down the side of the sink and collecting into a puddle on the ground. Apparently that is where John skins all of the animals he hunts. I am trying not to think about it as I sit here wearing my “freshly” laundered clothes, but I guess I will begin doing most of my laundry in the shower…
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Oh wow, you are doing A LOT of stuff! And you're really having a rough go of it with a lot of stuff out there too. Major props to you for sticking with it, and still doing all the science-y stuff. I wish I had something more substantive to say about the science, but that really isn't my strong suit. :p It sounds neat though!
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