Going to bat for biologists
Climbers lending hand in saving nocturnal creatures from deadly disease
Bats befuddle biologists.
They carouse at night, spending their days roosting in cliffy cracks, crevasses and caves.
So scientists studying the nocturnal critters typically are working blind. Simply finding bats is a challenge that hinders deeper understanding of whitenose syndrome, the devastating disease that appears to be marching westward after killing nearly 6 million bats in eastern North America.
In Colorado, bat biologists and land managers tasked with protecting wildlife are enlisting rock climbers as allies in the mission to track down and ultimately stop the spread of white-nose syndrome.
“If climbers can tell us where they see large or even small populations of bats, that can give us an opportunity to learn more about bat populations, roosting ecology and hopefully we can learn
more about white-nose syndrome,” said Robert Schorr, a researcher with Colorado State University’s Colorado Natural Heritage Program. He co-founded the Climbers for Bat Conservation group a few years ago in an effort to expand bat research beyond the limited reach of bat scientists.
Last month Schorr joined climbers, biologists and Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Forest Service officials beneath the granite pinnacle of the Rampart Range’s Devil’s Head to snare bats. The idea was to show climbers how their work could enable scientists in the battle against the tissue-eating fungus that threatens bat populations across the continent.
“Showing them bats and giving them hands-on experience is key,” Schorr said.
Cliff-probing climbers are the latest in a growing community of outdoor-recreating citizens to offer their insights and observations to scientists. Annual bird counts have enlisted tens of thousands of backyard birders who have bolstered research and understanding of the continent’s bird populations and migration patterns for more than a century. The popular online inaturalist.org community of more than 430,000 users has logged 5.2 million observations of 116,000 species, feeding the publicly funded Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s vast network of biological datasets.
In March, hikers near Seattle found a bat unable to fly and called a wildlife official, who ultimately determined the little brown bat suffered from white-nose syndrome, marking the first recorded occurrence of the bat disease in western North America.
Wildlife officials in the Pike National Forest regularly enroll citizen teams for biological research tasks like looking for Pawnee montane skipper butterflies, an endangered species found around the South Platte River basin.
“There is huge potential for recreationists to help further the work of wildlife biologists in particular and land managers in general,” said Mikele Painter, a biologist with the Forest Service’s South Platte Ranger District. “The possibilities range from incidental to organized, and from personal contacts in the field to preprogrammed apps online. Really, our imagination is the only limitation.”
With increased connections online, Painter often recruits insights through emails and fields more and more inquiries from people out using their public lands, curious about what they are seeing. Recently some roadside campers in her district reported a large raptor cruising around their campsite and Painter recognized it as an elusive northern goshawk, which is designated as a “sensitive” or vulnerable species in the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region. She was able to identify a nearby nest and establish protec- tion measures for the area.
And that’s where climbers get worried. Wildlife officials can close areas for climbing if a species is threatened by recreation. Many crags around the country are seasonally closed to climbers while raptors are nesting.
It’s taken some work for bat biologists to convince climbers the conservation effort is not about seeking out places that should be closed to climbing as much as it is gathering information on bat behavior. Ideally, reports could help biologists learn about where bats roost, what time of year they tend to visit certain areas and how populations are changing over the years.
“We want to make perfectly clear that the type of information and help we are looking for from our climbers is not at all related to any future plans of closing access to protect bat sites,” Painter said.
After dozens of meetings at rock gyms, interactions and events like the bat rally at Devil’s Head, climbers are embracing their side gig as bat watchers.
“Climbers are not the most extroverted group. There is always a population that wants to denounce outsides and not interact. But the younger generation seems to be more supportive and understanding as they learn more about this project,” said Ben Scott, the president of the Northern Colorado Climbing Coalition, which has worked closely with the Climbers for Bat Conservation effort.
Scott’s members — along with members of other climbing groups such as the Pikes Peak Climbers Alliance — can hit up the conservation group online — via its website climbersforbats.colostate.edu or its Facebook page — to report bat sightings. While there hasn’t been any climberspurred discoveries of huge bat populations yet, word is spreading.
“It’s part of a process,” Schorr said. “We have to keep engaging the community. My ultimate vision is the climbers are not only aware of the project but they are engaged and enthusiastic about what we are trying to do and we, someday, have a great story to tell about how our collaboration helped us better understand these critically important creatures.”