Breaking out nets to find endangered bat
THE work isn’t glamorous and the hours aren’t great, but when Cynthia Hauser gazes into the eyes of a bat, the ticks, the mosquitoes and the ever-present danger of Lyme disease seem to just fade away.
Hauser loves bats. She always has — starting from her days as a teenage spelunker in Pennsylvania.
And it’s that passion that has brought her and three colleagues to this muddy, overgrown field north of Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, on a steamy, sticky July night. These acres of trees, tall grasses and wild blackberry bushes may soon be leveled to make way for a new rail yard to accommodate hundreds of Metro subway cars as part of the Washington area’s multibillion-dollar Silver Line. That is, unless Hauser and her team find that among the many species of bats snoozing in the trees is one particular type: the northern long-eared bat, recently declared “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.
Such surveys are required when a project involving a federal agency might encroach on the habitat of a threatened or endangered species, according to Catherine Hibbard, a spokeswoman for US Fish and Wildlife Service. The presence of just one of these bats won’t stop the project, but it could mean a potentially costly delay of several months.
It was in May when officials with the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which is over-seeing construction of the US$5.8 billion (RM22 billion) rail line, became aware that these tiny bats with their distinctive ears might be an issue.
They hired GAI Consultants to survey the parcel, which is more than 90 acres. Spokeswoman Marcia McAllister said that the MWAA will pay about US$40,000 for the survey and that the cost will probably be covered by the project’s US$551.5 million contingency fund.
Like many of their relatives, northern long-eared bats, so named for their distinctive ears, have been victims of white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that is killing bats at alarming rates.
It’s nearly dusk when the survey group arrives in the field just off Old Ox Road.
They don bright orange construction vests, hard hats and goggles before spraying themselves liberally with tick and mosquito repellent. Part of the field has recently been mowed, but lurking in the remaining grassy areas are a bevy of creepy-crawlies, many of them out for blood.
As a precaution, team members seal the space between the bottom of their pants and the tops of their boots with duct tape. In this line of work, bats are perhaps the least scary of the creatures they’ll encounter. — WP-Bloomberg