Bats, especially evening (or vesper) bats, remain mysterious in many ways. Bats are excellent at hiding away during daylight hours, they fly quickly, and some species of myotis are difficult to distinguish from one another. Their breeding habits, social habits, migratory habits and habitat needs can be difficult to discover.

How to Track the Elusive Bat

U.S. Forest Service biologist Pat Ormsbee started the Bat Grid Inventory and Monitoring Group in 2002, a partnership of 20 agencies and organizations designed to collect as much baseline data about the presence of bats in Washington and Oregon as possible. This year, for the second time, volunteers and biologists from multiple agencies came together at The Nature Conservancy’s Moses Coulee Preserve to learn the latest field techniques in bat research.

The Bat Grid

By training people to collect data in the same way, the Bat Grid enables all the organizations and agencies interested in bats to collaboratively build a huge archive of data and allow researchers to investigate questions across longer periods of time and greater geographic areas than ever before.

Photographer Michael Durham accompanied the researchers and gathered these incredible and unusual photographs (at right) of bats at night.

Nature picture credits  left to right, top to bottom): Photo © Michael Durham(pallid bat)