Written by: Robert Bender
After a fairly wet May, we had fine weather for batting and two ladders, for Casey at the north end and me at the south end, each with a team of supporters to help move the ladder, carry bat bags and scribe. Several park visitor groups stopped to have a show-and-tell and were all amazed at how tiny and beautiful bats are and took many photos. Casey at C35, Kiri scribing.
There were two large groups of Gould’s, Casey got one in C33 and I got the other in C36:
And three boxes with Freetails, this is C13.
Steve and Lindy soon took the first bags to start pro-cessing in the Visitor Centre, Steve concentrating on microchipping several new Freetails and taking genetic samples. Emmi had brought her shy 4-year-old daughter Riva.
Tim Uebergang was there again, scribing for Lindy, who shared banding the few new Gould’s with Casey.
And his daughter Austen scribed for Anita.
While Doug worked with Danielle, & Michael with me
We were all done by 6:30 and after a lengthy clean-up of an amazing amount of gear, drove down to release the 121 bats we’d captured. Little Riva was excited to have a bat on a bag to watch it fly off.
It was a chilly evening, and some bats had started going back into torpor so took a while to work up the energy to flap off down the track. I put some reluctant ones on my cap, all of which eventually flew off.
The last bat didn’t want to go, so I unpacked the ladder and climbed to C31. Of course, as I was about to take the bat from my cap and put it into the box, it flew off. We all left the park by 7:30, after Michael helped jump-start my car, which had a flattened battery from leaving head-lights on to illuminate the bat release.
| Box | Bat | Species | Adult
M F |
|
| C33 | 40 | Gould’s | 1 | 39 |
| C36 | 32 | Gould’s | 19 | 13 |
| C25 | 6
5 |
Gould’s
Lge Forest |
2
2 |
4
3 |
| C15 | 9 | Freetail | 9 | |
| C22 | 8 | Gould’s | 8 | |
| C24 | 8 | Gould’s | 2 | 6 |
| C13 | 7 | Freetail | 1 | 8 |
| C27 | 2
1 |
Gould’s
Lge Forest |
1 |
2 |
| C42 | 2 | Freetail | 2 | |
| C18 | 1 | Gould’s | 1 | |
| 121 | Totals | 29 | 92 | |
