“I found it!”
After half an hour of fighting green briars and an incline of nearly eighty degrees I have never been so glad to see a flash of neon orange as I call out to the others. Answering whoops of excitement come echoing over the loose tumble of rocks that mark the path of an old landslide as I scramble up the crumbling side of the ravine to make it the last few feet to the golden chalice, the lost treasure, the x on the map that we’ve been following only semi-successfully for the last hundred yards of elevation. Spoiler alert: it’s a hole.
Behind me, a yelp and a loud shuffle-thud combination announces my partner, Sydney, as she acquaints herself with the same steep and unstable lip of the ravine that left me armpit deep in greenbriars minutes earlier. A slightly more controlled shuffle and concerned inquiry determines the location of our third hiking companion and benevolent driver Juliet as she picks her way down the gully, checking up on Sydney in passing. Tomorrow, we will all be feeling the aches and pains of a steep uphill and innumerable thorn scratches, but for now excitement is thick in the air.
In front of me is the hole, nearly four feet across and half as tall, with four thick metal bars crisscrossing the opening. It’s not a very inviting sight for someone as large as I am, but for a smaller occupant, this might be the perfect roost. Since late August, Sydney and I have been wandering the woods, sometimes with maps, sometimes with a guide, looking for abandoned mines like this one. This particular mine is unassuming, small and tucked away in natural rubble, but some of the thirteen sites we are
monitoring have openings large enough for a person to stand upright in, or, as Sydney helpfully pointed out, to crawl out of like a monster from a horror movie. But we’re not looking for people or horror movie creatures, we’re looking for something much smaller and cuter and we’re not even looking with our eyes.
As Juliet and Sydney catch up, I turn away from the mine’s mouth and towards the orange flash I saw earlier. A piece of bright flagging flutters ten yards from the mine entrance to mark the place where a nondescript green box is strapped to a tree. I break out one of the half dozen keys we carry between us (experience has shown you can never have enough backups) and unlock the box to liberate two tiny SD cards. These inch by inch chips are what brought us up the incline and through the brambles. If we’re lucky, somewhere in the thousands of sound recordings stored in each card there will be the distinctive feeding buzzes and social calls that tell us we’ve found what we’re looking for: Bats!
There are seventeen species of bats in North Carolina, but in the areas we’re surveying only thirteen are present and of those thirteen two species are of special interest to us: the Northern Long-Eared Bat and the Tri-Colored Bat. The Northern Long-Eared bat is currently endangered and susceptible to white nose syndrome, a fungus that has been
affecting many of the bat populations in the eastern parts of North America and Canada for the last few years and the Tri-Colored bat is not yet endangered but is up for listing as an endangered species. In both cases, any data we can provide about their population numbers, preferred roosts or hibernacula, and feeding
habits could contribute to the protection of these species down the line.
The full SD cards that I pocket as we slip fresh ones into the slots and feed new batteries into our recorder have almost a month’s worth of sound recordings that we’ll spend the next few days downloading and analyzing to identify what is and isn’t a bat. Since we're out during the day and out above ground, we don't see the bats themselves, but we do get to hear them on our recordings and from there we can begin to piece together a picture of which species use each mine, how often, and maybe even for what.
From the desk work to the hour-long drives, this project has been keeping Sydney, Juliet, and I busy this semester. Together we’ve made a small anthology of stories from each day out in the field, including the pit mines that we tiptoe around to avoid falling in, the horizontal shafts we need two people to measure, and the literal holes in the ground. Each of our mines is a different experience and as the semester rolls on we’ll be compiling the data we've gathered
from each of these various sites to examine the question of which of these spaces bats are using, Even when we don't find as many bat calls at a site, however, it's always an adventure to go out to the mines, and who knows what other treasures we might find on the way!
- Zoë Heard