There's cause for a little optimism when it comes to N.B. bats

Crawl under a bridge in New Brunswick this summer and you might just come across Karen Vanderwolf. Mouse activity, pigeon nests. The biologist has been crawling around more than 300 bridges this year looking for this. It's quite old, but that's it. Bat excrement, or guano. It's been really fun. I've seen a lot of the province. I've been driving all over the province all summer. I've put about 5,000 miles on my car. I actually smushed this before. That's one of the ways I tell if it's bat or not. It's really easy to smush bat guano. If it's mouse, which it probably wouldn't be on a surface like this, it's really hard. I wasn't quite sure what to expect going into this project because the population has been devastated so severely by white-nose syndrome. But in fact, about 22% of the bridges I've surveyed have bat guano, so bat poop. So this is really exciting for me. I wasn't quite expecting that high the use. So I'm really happy with the results so far. Finding new bat habitat is an important find considering what the small mammals have been through over the last two decades. In 2006 in New York State, they found a whole bunch of dead bats on the ground during the winter. And this was not normal at all. They didn't know what was going on. But eventually, through lab work and various studies, the scientists found that it was caused by a fungus. This fungus, the Latin name is Pseudogymnoscus destructans. There's no common name for that. And the fungus causes the disease white-nose syndrome in bats. It doesn't affect humans at all. So it only affects them during the winter. And it can cause very high mortality, particularly in three species of bat. It doesn't affect all bat species, especially those that never hibernate in caves. And from New York, it just spread throughout the continent. So it hit this province, New Brunswick, in 2011. We saw the same thing everybody else was seeing. You go into a cave, you see all these thousands of dead bats. We knew it was here. Yeah, that was very depressing. So huge mortality in those initial years, 2011, 2012. Some of the caves had no bats anymore. We do regular winter surveys to see what's going on there. And the population has remained very low. Our previous survey was in 2022. We saw about 270 bats, where we used to see thousands. But we repeated our surveys just this past April, and we found 470 bats. So the population has increased a little. So it is nice to see it going in the right direction. But, of course, it's still very low compared to what it used to be. Well, I think, actually, the recovery is occurring a little more quickly than I might have expected, at least for little brown bats. We have one site that we're visiting where we're seeing 250 to 300 bats during the winter months. So there are some other sites we're going to where there were none, and now there are five, six, seven. So it's occurring, I think, a little more quickly than I might have expected. Do you think someday that bat population will be back to where it was? I'm optimistic. I think it will. It might take hundreds of years, probably not in my lifetime. But I think it will come back eventually.