B.C. organization looking for volunteers to count bats this summer

A big brown bat is seen in an image from Shutterstock.com.

A B.C. conservation organization is looking for volunteers to spend a few evenings this summer counting bats to help biologists monitor populations across the province.

The B.C. Annual Bat Count, run by the B.C. Community Bat Program, officially kicked off on Saturday, and anyone can join in.

Volunteer bat-counters are asked to sit outside a “maternity roost” at sunset for an hour and make note of how many fly out. Participants conduct four bat counts over the summer, two early in the season, when females are flying, and another two later, when their pups are learning how to fly. Volunteers then send their data to the organization at the end of the summer.

“Female bats roost together in summer and raise their young in maternity colonies,” explained co-ordinator Paula Rodriguez de la Vega in a news release. “They generally only have one pup per female in June.”

Roost sites can be found in abandoned houses, attics, barns, church steeples, bridges or designated bat boxes.

According to B.C. Bats, volunteers conducted 888 bat counts at 274 sites across the province.

“The data collected is really important as it helps us know how the bat populations are doing in B.C.,” Rodriguez de la Vega said.

B.C. Bats says the citizen science project is more important than ever now due to the presence of white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease which is fatal for the animals.

White nose syndrome hasn’t shown up in B.C. yet, but it is predicted to spread here in the near future, and the fungus that causes the disease has been found in 2022 in the West Kootenay region.

More information on how to get involved in the B.C. Bat Count can be found on the B.C. Bats website.