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Missouri Department of Conservation has been monitoring bat populations
since the mid-1970s. There was the first big effort started back then.
And we have a very good
baseline of data on winter bat surveys and summer bat surveys. We survey several dozen
caves, mostly for grey bats
and Indiana bats which are both endangered.
But along the way we also count other species of bats keeping tabs on them.
So in the winter we would go in and visually count the bats,
but with only two or three biologists going very quietly and trying to get in and out
without disturbing the bats and waking them up.
We also supplement that nowadays with digital photography which enables us to identify
bats way high on ceilings that we couldn't see very well before.
In the summer we spent a lot of time
surveying grey bats because they're the only bat
in Missouri that uses caves to a large extent and actually
bears young in the cave. So maternity colonies of grey bats
are counted using thermal infrared video
as the bats fly out at night we get a a video image
in the dark
of their body heat
and this body heat image is used on a computer program
to actually count the bats so we're getting more accurate counts.
We think that there's probably seven hundred thousand grey bats in Missouri these days
and they're eating many tons of insects every year. And we know that grey bats are generally
increasing in Missouri
because of the conservation work that we and other people have been doing for 30 years.