Alabaster Bat Count - 2014 - page 3

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.

Click on any photo to see an enlarged version and click on link to see full 10 megapixel picture in full size.