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00:00:15 Marina Garlick

Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of Naturally Speaking. I'm your host Marina Garlick and today I'm going to take you under my wing to explore the mysterious and largely misunderstood world of bats in the North Country.

00:00:29 Marina Garlick

I'm joined by Jessica Harmon, a research fellow from St. Lawrence University. This summer, she is conducting mobile acoustic surveys of the bat species abundance and richness. Together we will soar through the particulars of the diversity, health and monitoring research of the bats that live right in your backyard. Let's get into it.

00:00:52 Marina Garlick

Hi, Jessica. How are you doing today? Good. Would you mind introducing yourself a little bit for our listeners?

00:00:58 Jessica Harmen

Yeah. So my name is Jess, and I'm a Conservation Biology major at St. Lawrence University, and I'm doing research on bats this summer.

00:01:08 Marina Garlick

That's so cool. What? Professor are you working with?

00:01:10 Jessica Harmen

Erica Barthelmess.

00:01:12 Marina Garlick

Oh, that's so cool. For those of you who don't know, Erica Barthelmess is the founder of natur up North, and she founded us 12 years ago. But she's been with St. Lawrence for about 26 years, which is crazy.00:01:24 Jessica Harmen

Wow.

00:01:25 Marina Garlick

Yeah, she's a staple of here. So you're saying you're doing research on bats, right? Yes. Awesome. And what interests you about bats?

00:01:33 Jessica Harmen

Well, Oh my gosh, they're just so fascinating. Cause you never really see them. And there's all this stigma around them. People really don't like them. They think they're gonna get caught up in your hair all all kinds of messed up and and give you diseases and stuff. And but they're so elusive and I think that's really, really fascinating about about them. Yeah, they're misunderstood.

00:01:54 Jessica Harmen

But then you know the average person won't really see them.

00:01:59 Marina Garlick

Yeah, I think that is definitely part of the mystique of that. And I really see a lot of that in media as well, around bats.

00:02:05 Marina Garlick

Specifically, what are you researching about bats specifically?

00:02:10 Jessica Harmen

Specifically I'm doing mobile acoustic surveys of bat abundance, and bat species abundance and richness in St. Lawrence County. So I'm just, I'm just recording them so I don't. I don't do any hands on kind of work with them. I'm just  you know, listening to what they're saying.

00:02:31 Marina Garlick

That really interesting. I'd love to hear more about your research, but first I think our listeners would like to know what kind of bats there are in the North Country. According to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation or the Dec, there are 9 species of bats in New York, 6 are cave dwelling, and three are tree dwelling. What would you like to add about these species specifically?

00:02:51 Jessica Harmen

Yeah. So. Tree bats. A lot of people don't know. But, you know, bats.

00:02:55 Jessica Harmen

These species, they live in trees and they migrate in the winter, so they don't hibernate and the three tree species I have my list here. We have the Horry bat, the eastern red bat the and the silver haired bat and those are tree species.

00:03:09 Jessica Harmen

And then our cave species, we have big brown rats, little brown bats, small footed bats, northern long eared bats, tricolored bats and maybe Indiana bats. They're endangered, so not really sure about that one.

00:03:22 Marina Garlick

Indiana bats are endangered in New York, and there has been efforts over the past few decades to protect their hibernation sites. And this is because there are two hibernation sites within New York, in caves that house more than half of the population of Indiana bats, and thus if those caves get infected with white nose syndrome, then that would devastate the population even further. So there's been efforts to block in those caves, like with gates, so that humans don't enter them and to work in tandem with land owners and other land trusts in New York to protect these bats.

00:04:06 Marina Garlick

Now back to the tree, bats, I didn't know that some bats migrate. Where do they migrate to?

00:04:13 Jessica Harmen

Just you know South.

00:04:14 Jessica Harmen

So no, I don't know too much.

00:04:15 Marina Garlick

No, that's super neat. I I feel like we talk about like birds migration a lot and our best part of the bird species or are they mammals?  There's flying mammals.

00:04:23 Jessica Harmen

They're mammals. Yeah.

00:04:25 Marina Garlick

Yeah, just flying mammals. Yeah, that's so cool.

00:04:28 Jessica Harmen

Rats with wings. And my dad calls them.

00:04:34 Marina Garlick

That's awesome. What would you say? Like the most common bat up here? Like, if you were or like a bat, you're most likely if you were to see a bat, what bat would it be?

00:04:46 Jessica Harmen

Well, I don't know. I feel like people get big Browns and little Browns in their houses a lot. Yeah, people would see them most often, and I think they're the least afraid of humans and the most likely to come near, but yeah.

00:05:01 Marina Garlick

Yeah. Interesting. So you're saying you're doing acoustic richness and abundance. Right? 00:05:08

Yeah.

00:05:08 Marina Garlick

OK, what? What does richness mean?

00:05:10 Jessica Harmen

Richness is just how many species we're able to record and then abundance is like how many of each species we're able to get. So we're seeing how many of these nine species of bats are we going to be able to get recordings of and?

00:05:25 Jessica Harmen

And how many individual bats can we? Can we find also?

00:05:30 Marina Garlick

Ah, that's cool. What have you found so far this summer?

00:05:33 Jessica Harmen

Haven't analyzed it yet, but you know, just just getting the recordings, getting out and driving that. We're at the collection phase of the research. So more to come. You know. Yeah.

00:05:43 Marina Garlick

That's awesome. Are you doing this research by yourself like has? Is it like an ongoing body of research or like an individual project for the summer?

00:05:52 Jessica Harmen

Well, Erica had this project going about 10 years ago, but and we're doing the same routes. That we that we drove 10 years ago, I wasn't. I wasn't here. But you know. But she unfortunately she lost the data from 10 years ago, but we're kind of continuing the project and doing it the same way that it had been done. So I'm kind of picking up what other people have already laid down and working from there.

00:06:17 Marina Garlick

That’s awesome. So what does like? A day in the life of a bat recording biologist look like yeah.

00:06:25 Jessica Harmen

OK, day in the life I could do a day in the life, so I wake up at around noon because I've been out late doing my survey the night before. And then I come in to the lab and I get my, I have my laptop that all my recordings are on.

00:06:41 Jessica Harmen

And then I put the data from that like the GPS files for where the recordings are, where we get each like individual bat. It'll it separates the recordings for you. So you don't have to sift through and find the bats. It's just boom, there was sound here and where was that? And so I have the file.

00:07:02 Jessica Harmen

For the sound and I have the file for the GPS and I take that file and I make sure it's labeled properly because I'm not labeling properly at at midnight the night before and then I put that onto a hard drive and I put that on to the other computer. So we make two backups of it.

00:07:18 Jessica Harmen

And then I write down. I have a sheet that I fill out with like the weather and like barometric pressure and all this stuff. And then I write that up onto the computer also. And just to keep track of data. So I'm doing during the day data analysis and then I'm what I'm going to start doing is analyzing the bat calls for what species we're actually getting.

00:07:39 Jessica Harmen

And that'll be something that I'll do during the day. And I've actually started doing that a little bit. I run it through this, this program called Kaleidoscope Pro. And it has an AI that will tell me what species I'm getting.

00:07:59 Jessica Harmen

And then I just export that spreadsheet and I've started saving those so gonna collect that and then so during the day I'm doing all that stuff, doing all the data, crunching the numbers, and then I get a little break, I get my dinner and then I go out at about 8:00 and then I do my, So then it's sunset. It's been around 8:48 for sunset.

00:08:21 Jessica Harmen

Recently and then 30 minutes after sunset, I get to my route, my spot where I'm supposed to go, and we start exactly 30 minutes after sunset, every every night, and I sometimes I'm alone. Sometimes I bring a friend and I go out and I do the route 18 miles an hour. Woohoo.

00:08:42 Marina Garlick

Whipping it along the road. That's awesome.

00:08:46 Jessica Harmen

Yep.

00:08:47 Marina Garlick

And are you doing different routes each night, or is it the same route each night?

00:08:50 Jessica Harmen

Yeah. So we have a quite a few routes that we're working on. We have them split up into agriculture and I don't know. So like deciduous forests and something else, I've only just done the agriculture one because I've just finished up. We did some surveys for the DEC.

00:09:08 Jessica Harmen

That were their own kind of routes, and now I'm just getting into the ones.

00:09:12 Jessica Harmen

Where we're labeling them differently and they're they're our own routes that we actually created, so.

00:09:18 Marina Garlick

That's so cool. Do you because you're using the same routes that were designed 10 years ago, right? Do you know what goes into, like designing a route to survey bats?

00:09:27 Jessica Harmen

You know, I don't know all that much about GIS. Erica did it all for me. Shout out Erica.

00:09:33 Marina Garlick

Yeah, absolutely. You know, that's so cool. I gotta corner her later to ask her about that?

00:09:38 Marina Garlick

Hmm, cool. And then you get to bed like, super late. How long does like a recording usually take if you're starting at, like, 9:00 PM?

00:09:47 Jessica Harmen

It depends on how long the route is, but usually I'm home at like 11:30, midnight. You know, that kind of region.

00:09:59 Marina Garlick

And do you get any nights off or is it just seven days a week?

00:10:03 Jessica Harmen

I get weekends. And and if there's rain, we can't go in the rain.

00:10:09 Marina Garlick

OK, so it's all the random thunderstorms we've been having.

00:10:12 Jessica Harmen

Yeah, those nights I'm not out with my recorder.

00:10:15 Marina Garlick

Is the recorder like Mountain on top of the truck or is it like out the window

00:10:23 Jessica Harmen

Mm-hmm. So it's plugged into the laptop and then that cord goes out the right passenger window and the recorder is huge. It's like.

00:10:29 Jessica Harmen

The size of I guess of football, so not too big, but then you put that over the passenger side door. Mm-hmm. And it magnets to the top of the car on the passenger side.

00:10:40 Marina Garlick

And you're only going 18 miles an hour. You're not going very fast enough to like mess with the magnets.

00:10:44 Jessica Harmen

Yeah, that's not gonna fly off. It's a strong magnet, too. I don't think it would. That's it's hard to get on there. It's hard to get off, you know?

00:10:55 Marina Garlick

Yeah, that's crazy. And when you're getting like, these recordings in, could you hear any of these sounds with, like, just your ears or are they too high pitched for humans to hear?

00:11:04 Jessica Harmen

Ooh, good question. So they're too high pitched for humans to hear usually, but with the laptop open in the passenger seat, I can hear like it. It'll pitch it down to a frequency that humans can hear it at, and I can hear it in real time as we're recording. Just really cool, it sounds like. [makes bat noise]

00:11:20 Marina Garlick

Ohh.

00:11:23 Jessica Harmen

And sometimes you get. That's just the regular the the call and and and each recording is is called the Bat Pass. When we. So when we get a bat pass, it's either a a call or you. Sometimes you get a feeding bus and. Then they're like. [makes another differnt bat noise]

00:11:41 Jessica Harmen

I'm not a very good bat.

00:11:44 Marina Garlick

I think you're a great bat, honestly, pretty impressive. Let's take a second to listen to some audio recordings of Big Brown bat passes. So first, let's listen to the Big Brown bat call.

00:11:58 [Big brown bat call]

00:12:06 Marina Garlick

And now comparing it to the feeding buzz of also the big brown.

00:12:11 [Big brown bat feeding buzz]

00:12:22 Marina Garlick

Isn't that so cool? The difference?

00:12:24 Jessica Harmen

It speeds it speeds up towards the end of the call, and that's them echolocating and zooming in on their prey item and maybe catching it as they get closer to it. They speed up their their call so they can see it better. I see it in air quotes

00:12:40 Marina Garlick

Yeah, that makes sense cause like it's, if you're you're narrowing in your focus from, like, a wide focus of the echolocation of like oh, there's an object here and then you get closer and so those calls are coming back quicker and quicker and closer to the object.

00:12:53 Jessica Harmen

Exactly.

00:12:55 Marina Garlick

That's so neat.

00:12:56 Jessica Harmen

More and more feedback and then you get it.

00:12:57 Marina Garlick

Yeah, hopefully.

00:13:00 Marina Garlick

Mm-hmm. Hopefully for the bats. You were saying there was like, a feeding call. And then just like a regular pass call.

00:13:07 Jessica Harmen

Yeah.

00:13:08 Marina Garlick

When you get the like pitched down version, are you like have been able to distinguish between the different types of bats when you hear them or do they all kind of sound the same.

00:13:15 Jessica Harmen

So you can hear when some of them are kind of higher pitch and then some of them are kind of lower pitch and you can go OK, so that's a high pitch bat that's a low pitch bat and but.

00:13:26 Jessica Harmen

That you can't really. You can't figure out the species. Just from that, you can just be like, OK, so this was.

00:13:32 Jessica Harmen

It was a low one, so it's probably like a Hoary bat and and you can kind of do that, but it's it's really quite hard to identify bad species from their calls. It's they're very, very similar. You have to really get into the minutia of like this initial lip of that, you have to analyze the shape of it in the. In the spectrogram it's just.

00:13:57 Jessica Harmen

It's really quite hard. So we have the AI helping us out.

00:14:00 Marina Garlick

There. Yeah, for sure. That's super helpful, especially with like a detailed assessment, probably some sort of calculus involves. Yeah, that's super cool.

00:14:12 Marina Garlick

How are the bats doing generally in the North Country?

00:14:16 Jessica Harmen

Ohh, how are they doing?

00:14:18 Jessica Harmen

Well, you know, to get into white nose syndrome a little bit that that is a fungal disease that came over from some country and and and started infecting bats here in New York State in the in the eastern US in 2006 was the 1st white nose infection and since then, bats up here have not been doing great. To my understanding, there's a few species that have lost like.

00:14:47 Jessica Harmen

90% of their populations, it's just. Oh, it's rough for them and.

00:14:53 Jessica Harmen

You know, there's things like like habitat loss and the oh, what are those, those, the windmills? Those things?

00:14:58 Marina Garlick

Yeah, like just windmills.

00:15:01 Jessica Harmen

Yeah, that's what they're like.

00:15:05 Jessica Harmen and Marina Garlick

Ohh wind turbines.

00:15:06 Jessica Harmen

Yeah, like yeah, not just that your windmill. Your windmill in your backyard isn't gonna do it, but the the turbines. Ohh, they're taking out bats. Yeah, there's a lot of threats that bats face in our area and.

00:15:19 Jessica Harmen

Yeah. So they're, they're not doing, they're not doing too great, but that's what we're going to try and assess with the research is you know, what's what's here, how are they doing? No one's really done this kind of thing in our region too much before. So this is kind of a preliminary, like, OK, let's assess.

00:15:38 Jessica Harmen

How are bats in Saint Lawrence County doing?

00:15:41 Marina Garlick

Yeah, that's awesome. And you said that there was some like research you guys were doing with the DEC yeah, and what's the DEC working on like, are they working on a more like large scale bat assessment?

00:15:52 Jessica Harmen

Yeah, I to my understanding, I think that they were doing just all over New York. They had people out doing surveys and they had standardized, of course, how you're going to do it and it's kind of a, I guess citizen science project, but yeah.

00:16:08 Jessica Harmen

That goes into it, so maybe not so much citizen science, but.

00:16:13 Jessica Harmen

Yeah, it was the same general idea as what they had us doing.

00:16:15 Marina Garlick

That's super cool. Yeah. Do you know if if for any?

00:16:21 Marina Garlick

Conservation efforts are happening in the area or is it mostly like trying to figure out what's going on with the bats at this point?

00:16:26 Jessica Harmen

You know, I'm not really sure I know well, the DEC doing their monitoring efforts.

00:16:34 Jessica Harmen

I don't really know that there's much in our really local area in in the way of bats. I've not heard much.

00:16:41 Marina Garlick

Yeah.

00:16:42 Marina Garlick

Cause St. Laurence actually has a bat house up by the sustainability farm or where the sustainability farm used to be, like out by the Living Lab building.

00:16:52 Jessica Harmen

I didn't know that.

00:116:54 Marina Garlick

Yeah, I didn't know either. I was on like, canoeing on the Little River. I was like, what? I need to reach out to doctor Ashpole. I was like, wait, is there a bat house?

00:16:57 Marina Garlick

But apparently it hasn't got an activity yet. Ohh bummer. Sad.

00:17:10 Marina Garlick

If you were about looking for a house, where would you want your bat house to be? Cus we have a bat house like nature up north of the Bat house.

00:17:20 Jessica Harmen

Ohh, I don't. I don't know. I you know I'm not a bat. It depends what kind of bat. I don't know if The Cave bats or the tree bats have a different. Yeah.

00:17:27 Jessica Harmen

Are they both using the bat boxes? I don't know.

00:17:31 Marina Garlick

Yeah, because I can imagine, like a cave bat, it's a little. That would be suspicious of the Bat house because it looks more like a tree.

00:17:34 Jessica Harmen

But if I'm a tree bat, I'd be like, why am I going in this bat box when there's 100 trees around? So I yeah, I don't know what they're thinking.

00:17:47 Marina Garlick

Interesting. I guess it's also like that. That's totally off topic. But like thinking about birds and bird houses. If like a bird usually lives in a tree, but then there's a house.

00:17:55 Jessica Harmen

Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me, actually. Wait a minute.

00:18:00 Marina Garlick

I have no idea. I mean, like that might be a topic for another podcast.

00:18:09 Marina Garlick

Cool. Well, thank you very much for explaining quite a bit about your research and interesting about is there any other like things about bats that you want the general people listening to Naturally Speaking to know?

00:18:22 Jessica Harmen

They're not going to get in your hair. They don't want to bite you. All the bats up here are insectivores. They.

00:18:28 Jessica Harmen

You want to eat the mosquitoes that you hate so much, so you should. You should be friends with them. Yeah, but of course, be careful and you know, don't go near them. You could get rabies just like any other. Any other mammal you can get rabies.

00:18:40 Jessica Harmen

From them, so yeah.

00:18:41 Jessica Harmen

You know, keep your distance, but be respectful and yeah, let's. I think everyone should be a little nicer to bats. Yeah.

00:18:48 Marina Garlick

Cool. Well, thank you very much for coming on the the show today

00:18:52 Jessica Harmen

Of course. Thank you for having me.

00:18:54 Marina Garlick

or the program today. Yeah, you're so welcome.

00:18:56 Marina Garlick

And that wraps up our conversation with Jessica Harmon on bats and bat research. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Naturally speaking, where we learned about bats in the North Country, their health, how they're monitored and their relationship with human society. Hope to see you next time on the podcast. Until then, get up and get outdoors with nature of north.

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