After the incident this weekend with the pup hitting the fence and breaking its wing, we decided to try to prevent that from happening again. On Sunday night we secured tarps and sheets over the fence (with lots of clothes pins, twine, and safety pins!) to make it more visible to the bats and to provide a somewhat softer surface in case they did hit. The number of hits went down from 20-30 the past few days to only 3 on Sunday night, and none of the bats were injured. It looked like our idea worked! We’ll keep the contraption up for maybe a week or so, which will give enough time for the pups to learn that the fence is there so they can better avoid it.
Our field setup, complete with tarps covering the
fence. The thermal imaging camera is the little thing on top of the silver box
(on the ground), which is connected via lots of cables to a camcorder and then
to the laptop/external hard drive. Each night’s emergence, once analyzed, takes
about 17GB of memory. I have already filled up almost an entire 1 terabyte hard
drive. Yikes!
The tarps make the fence more visible to the bats' echolocation and also provide somewhat of a cushion if they hit.
Plans are also in the works to move the fence back away from the cave mouth quite a bit, so once that gets done hopefully the bats will have enough time to see the fence and steer around it. The end goal is obviously to reduce the number of hits on the fence and reduce injury to the bats.
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