Hopefully, you read my last post on why bat conservation is important. Now I am going to get into the nitty gritty of my internship. I am part of the Directorate Fellowship Program (DFP) with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). As a DFP I am working on the North American Bat (NABat) Monitoring Program which has the goal to monitor bats all over North America, as the name suggests, in order to track any trends in species population presence or numbers including a number of concerns. NABat is an amazing project that involves the collaboration of many groups. I am personally working directly alongside USFWS and Bat Conservation International, but we also reach out to groups such as Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and public landowners.

              For a program of this scale, this collaboration is very important especially since we need access to a lot of land. NABat collects data from 4 sites in the different quadrants of each 10x10km grid cell. A software randomly choses the priority of each of these cells across North America. I am working on the top 3% priority cells in California. These cells can fall anywhere in California and the process is much simpler when they fall on land that already has similar interests as us, such as wildlife reserves or parks, but when they fall on public land a lot more outreach must be done to find landowners that are willing to participate in the program.

              The fun part is getting to deploy the detectors. We have equipment designed to record bat calls when bats emerge from sunset to sunrise. The microphones that can record these calls must be at least 12 feet high and we leave them at each site for four nights. This means I have gotten to see a lot of cool places and met some very nice homeowners. I have been to places all over California, from Ukiah, to Yosemite, to Napa, and I will even be going to Southern California next week!

              Aside from setting detectors at cool places my team has put me in contact with a lot of amazing people in the bat world as well as given me some awesome opportunities. I will talk about my extracurricular bat activities as a DFP in my next blog. 

Agency: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Program: US Fish & Wildlife Service - DFP

Location: Sacramento Regional Office