12/15/17- Bat Monitoring at Big Cypress National Preserve

     Working at Corkscrew has its perks. In the course of gaining invaluable experience in conservation in an old-growth cypress swamp, you meet plenty of interesting people that are usually involved in other regional conservation efforts in Southwest Florida. This week, I had the chance of helping volunteer and donor Ralph Arwood conduct bat monitoring surveys in another place he is heavily involved with-- Big Cypress National Preserve.

      Ralph is a jack of all trades. In my experience, he is almost solely responsible for clearing backcountry roads that are critical to resource and research staff at Corkscrew in the wake of Hurricane Irma. When he's not here wielding a chainsaw from sunup to sundown, he can be found assisting resource management projects at Big Cypress that span from tracking and collaring panthers for monitoring efforts to operating and servicing acoustic monitoring stations that listen in on Florida Bonneted bat calls. Today, I helped Ralph service an acoustic monitoring unit just off of 11-mile road in Big Cypress. Here's Ralph syncing the unit with a GPS that not only inputs spatial tags on the data, but also links up the unit with the time so that the acoustic monitor will turn on at sundown and turn off at sunrise. 

 Getting to this acoustic monitoring station was a real treat though. Just down a buggy path that runs deep into the preserve, there are multiple cypress domes bordering large pine flatwoods. These are no ordinary cypress trees, though. Due to the lack of available organic soil, these cypress are bonsai'd, giving them the physical appearance of pond cypresses but with a significantly reduced stature. Here's a glimpse of what the walk in looked like:

 Back to the Florida Bonneted Bats, though. Florida Bonneted Bats actually roost in vacated cavities created by Red Cockaded Woodpeckers, a target species that resource managers at Big Cypress plan and manage for given that these woodpeckers serve as an indication for a healthy forest stand composition. Here's what a Red Cockaded woodpecker cavity and perhaps future Florida Bonneted bat roost look like:

From the stroll through a miniature pond cypress stand to learning about different wildlife monitoring projects taking place in the greater Everglades area, today was both super informative and just plain fun.