Bats in the Belfry
There really could be bats in your belfry this Halloween, or it turns out, they may be snuggled up in your wood pile. After talking to researchers and other bat-fans, I learned that bats may hang out in interior Alaska all winter.
Myotis lucifugus, also known as little brown bats, are one of six different species that live in Alaska and the only bat seen with any regularity in the Interior. In the Lower 48, they typically migrate from wet, buggy feeding grounds in the summer to a moist cave for hibernating in winter. Up here, biologists such as Brian Lawhead of Alaska Biological Research in Fairbanks, have found that the bats prefer similar feeding grounds, but where they spend the winter hibernating is a mystery.
Keith Price, a Salcha homesteader, has had many close encounters with little brown bats. Each summer for about the past 30 years, the bats have set up a maternity colony---where bats give birth to and raise their young---in one of his potato barns.
Although it's not unheard of to see bats in the Interior, biologists say Price's barn is the farthest north bat nursery colony in the United States. What's even more remarkable is that bats have overwintered on his homestead.
Price once propped up a ladder and gently brought a dormant bat inside his house. The bat slowly awakened with twitches and snarls. "They're real interesting little guys," he said. "You don't relate to them until you see their face. They're really wicked---mostly teeth."
Unfortunately for the potential spookiness of this column, the little brown bats are gentle, and they don't drink blood. An Indiana biologist recently collected about 100 bat pellets from Price's barn and found out that the bulkiest ingredient was moth (71 percent of pellet volume), with a surprisingly high proportion of spider (16.8 percent) and a trace of mosquito (1.8 percent). Lawhead theorizes that the bats need to make their meals count by taking larger prey because interior Alaska's 22 hours of summer daylight limits the bats' hunting time to two-and-a-half to three hours. In darker climates the same bats often get to hunt twice a night with a rest period in between.
The real bat mystery begins in September, when the bats start to disappear. Lawhead said little brown bats in the Lower 48 have been known to migrate up to 200 miles. "No one really knows where these bats winter," Lawhead said of the Interior bats. "Whatever they're doing, they're doing it different than they're doing it down south."
He speculates that they might actually migrate to coastal Alaska or northwestern Canada, but he has a hard time visualizing them flying through mountain passes. Another possibility is that the bats find caves where it's moist enough to keep their bodies from drying out, which could be a bigger problem in the Interior than cold temperature. But to Lawhead's knowledge, no one has found a bat cave in interior Alaska yet.
In May, a woman in Nenana reported that a bat fell from a piece of firewood she was carrying. She said the bat warmed up and flew away after the rude awakening. Lawhead thinks this might be another example of where bats spend the interior Alaska winter.
"They might overwinter in areas under the snow," he said, such as under a loose piece of tree bark to take advantage of the snow's blanketing effect.
Rotten logs or tree cavities might also provide a safe haven because it would be moist enough to keep the membranous creatures alive during their seven-month slumber. Lawhead said some bats prefer an environment so wet that they are covered with water droplets as they hibernate.
Since I don't have a belfry, I'll go check the shower.
