Nevada's Bat Plan: Why the State's 23 Bat Species Need a New One

First published in The Midden, the Great Basin National Park newsletter, Vol. 21, No. 1, Summer 2021. By Bryan Hamilton, wildlife biologist.

A western big-eared bat leaves her pup at a cave roost to hunt for the night. NPS photo by Bryan Hamilton.

The bats overhead

On warm summer nights, huge numbers of bats fly above us unnoticed — we can't see them in the dark or hear their calls. Bats are the only mammals that truly fly, and they find and catch insects with high-frequency echolocation.

• All 23 of Nevada's bat species eat insects.
• Nationwide, bats' insect-eating is worth an estimated $53 billion a year — through lower food costs, less need for harmful pesticides, and less disease from insects such as mosquitoes.

That makes protecting bats important for human health and the economy.

Why a new plan

Nevada's Bat Conservation Plan came out in 2006. Since then, much more has been learned about bats — and new threats have appeared:

• White-nose syndrome, a fungal disease, has spread across North America over the past decade, killing millions of bats.
• Wind energy has proved deadly to bats, threatening the survival of migratory species such as the hoary bat.

Who is writing it

An interagency group is revising the plan:

• the Nevada Department of Wildlife;
• the Bureau of Land Management;
• the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service;
• the National Park Service;
• the Nevada Division of Natural Heritage.

The new plan will cover habitat, public health, species accounts, threats and survey methods, and is meant to guide bat protection in Nevada for the next decade.

More from this issue of The Midden: a short recap on Strawberry Creek Canyon · a peek inside the Wheeler Cirque glacier.

Sources

Based on "Nevada Bat Plan," by Bryan Hamilton, The Midden — Great Basin National Park, Vol. 21, No. 1, Summer 2021, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.