Alabaster Bat Count - 2014

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The Date: February 1, 2014 - One COLD day up in NW Oklahoma. Time for the annual Alabaster Caverns Bat Count! Volunteers from the Selman Bat Watch, Park Personnel, and Oklahoma Dept. of Wildlife decend on the park to take the annual hibernating bat census. This year with the discovery of White Nose Syndrome (WNS) in Arkansas and Missouri, we are doing swabs of 15 lucky bats (though they don't think so!) forearms to send off for analysis to see if they may be carring any faction of the WNS virus. 13 people went in and luckly (with that number) 13 came out again! <grin!> Many of these pictures show mulitiple views of the same bat or mat of bats. This is to give the scientists and bat experts different views to examine bats to see if they see other signs of WNS on the bats. Then we just got some for the volunteers to show that they do cool stuff, like scientific endevours, other than just talk about bats ALL of the time! :) Click on any photo to see an enlarged version and click on link to see full 10 megapixel picture in full size.
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Time for old friends to get together again...	and tell what has happened since we all last met. (Even though it was 25 and North COLD wind!)	Yes... Mel is still scared about the camera... I think when I say I'm going to shoot a picture she just hears SHOOT and ducks! :)
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Jerry is one happy puppy... he is going to be a granddad soon AND is retiring soon!!	We finally got some sence in our head and went into warmer climates!	Then down the trail to the entrance....
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... the start of Alabaster Bat Count 14 (ABC14)	Let's go!!	Boy...just to get out of the wind was nice!
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We got a briefing (for us old people who may have forgotten what to do and for the Newbies with us on what to do and safety concerns).	Mel trying to get a jump on it all!!	The briefing wasn't even over yet! <grin>
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One group got to go down to lower cave for a count...	So the young and brave take off for that part....	You have to crawl, duck under, slide to get down to the cold passages below...
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but it is usually worth it as there are usually big groups of bats down there.	Five hardy souls went down...	We'll see if all 5 come out again!
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After another mini-brief... then take off down the next low crawl	See ya!	Wouldn't want to be ya!
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Can I get through there?	Wonder if we'll ever see them again?	Meanwhile in the main cave... in the place where the big brown was last year we found this one...
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Orginally called a myotis and passed on...	One of the party afterwards looked closer...	Nope... that's a long ear... not a myotis!
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We haven't seen one of these in forever on a count here in Alabaster! They curl up their ears while hibernating!	Then everyone started looking a little harder! <grin>	It was exciting to see a big ear!
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As it was over all, we found four different species during the count	Western Big Ear, Cave Myotis, Big Brown, and Tri-Color (formally Pip)	There is always a trip off of trail down to a lower creek area where we usually find mats
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However last year we didn't find any bats here...	This time we found some mats.. none giant but some good sized (around 80)	One good thing about our looking at details... they all seemed healthy
Click on any photo to see an enlarged version and click on link to see full 10 megapixel picture in full size.

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Last updated: 2/2/14