2014 bat blitz

Bat folks all over the southeastern US are netting bats this week to see what is out there.  I figured I might contribute a bit by doing some netting in northern Virginia.  There are few rare or endangered bats here, so an area most others won't be hitting. 

But with White Nose Syndrome killing off so many bats in the east, I really did wonder what might still be around in this area.  So a really good team headed out this evening to net the Hidden Oaks area in Annandale, Fairfax County, Virginia.  This is Virginia, but inside the Capital Beltway, so pretty close to Washington, DC.

Our triple-high net was over a great corridor, and we had high hopes that it would catch some bats.

It is darn hard to see, but our net covered this corridor at 25 feet high and 40 feet wide.

But it was not to be.  This net set caught no bats, and a bat detector near the net showed very little activity.  But we did catch one bat in another net...

Shannon with a big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) and her son Colvin checking it out

Using Connor's light to view through the wing membrane. We do this to look at the bones to determine juveniles which do not yet have fully ossified joints. This was an adult male.

And that was it for the bats.  Just one big brown even though we had a pretty good site with good nets.  Tomorrow we will try again at Long Branch Stream Valley Park.

It was very warm out this evening, but few things seemed to be moving around.  But there were quite a lot of slugs, at such a speed as they move around, so here is a pic of the head of one big one.

The introduced leopard slug (Limax maximus) is not a native species, but seems to be doing very well at Hidden Oaks.