Some 86,000 bats found in cave
Only 14 caves in U.S. have as many
“It was, wow,” said Chris Ogle, a wildlife surveys manager with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.
“Wow” was finding an estimated 85,955 endangered gray bats in a cave west of Newport, Tenn., in Cocke County recently.
About two weeks ago, Ogle, fellow TWRA manager Daniel Istvanko and an unnamed Southeastern Cave Conservancy representative were sent to the cave, known as Rattlin’ Pit, which is owned by Newport Utilities, to do a bat count. Bat surveys are done periodically at a number of caves throughout the state.
“There are more than 10,000 caves in the state, so we don’t hit them all,” Ogle said. “This one we had heard about 15 years ago that there were maybe 16,000 bats. For this particular species, that is actually not a whole lot. There are three Tier 1 caves for gray bats in Tennessee that average roughly over 300,000 bats.
“We also knew that the last biologist who had gone into the cave had to be rescued out. It takes a 130-foot drop by rope to get in. I was a little concerned.”
Ogle said the cave turned out to be not that challenging once he’d taken the 130-foot drop.
“At first, we were seeing one or two bats and counting them individually,” he said. “Then, all of a sudden, they were clustered everywhere.”
He said the estimates are done using a laser measuring tool and a well-tested “cheat sheet” that make the counting fairly accurate. However, the crew had little time in the cave because of the need to get in and out.
“We want to disturb their hibernation as little as possible. They have only so much food stored up and waking them caused them to use up energy,” he said.
Ogle said most of the bats were not in the huge cavern in which they landed but instead hanging in a maze of passageways leading from it.
“We went down into areas that were only 3 feet or so tall, and the bats are hanging right above you. It’s pretty wild because they are right there, and these bats tend to wake up pretty quick.”
He said they were in the cave counting bats only for around a half hour, not including the time it took to rope their way down and back up. Although he expects they had seen the largest concentration of bats, he said, the crew covered only about 10 percent of the cave.
“It turned out to be a pretty important cave. There are only 14 caves in the country that are Tier 1 [roughly meaning an estimate of more than 50,000 bats]. This is the fourth one in Tennessee.”
He said he was at a regional conference last week when he was asked repeatedly about the find.
“The word had definitely gotten out,” Ogle said. “They wanted to know all about it.”
Ogle said both he and Istvanko had been in the state’s other three Tier 1 caves so they know what such bat colonies look like, “but when you go in a cave expecting 200 or so bats and you find this, it was definitely ‘wow.’”
He said they found about a half-dozen bats that were banded, meaning they had been captured for study and released at other caves — probably ones in Hawkins County and Virginia — and later made their way to Newport.
The plan likely will be to come back this summer to do what is called an emergence count. Most bats only stay in caves during the winter, but gray bats will make caves home year-round. They would hope to band some of the bats at that time.
The gray bat is listed on both the state and federal endangered species list. They were expected to be de-listed, but that decision was put on hold with the emergence of white-nose syndrome, which killed off more than 5 million bats nationally. Gray bats aren’t as prone to WNS as other bats, and no evidence of the disease was found in the Newport cave.
“This is really encouraging,” TWRA spokesman Matthew Cameron said. “It is good news that the bats were found, and good news that there is apparently no white-nose syndrome.”