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| We met a bit later... 11 a.m. as Duane drives way from Ft. Worth to get here. | This is Andrew's first bat count (John's son) and he was ready to go. | As Duane and John arrived about 30 minutes early, they decided to get Train Tunnel out of the way. |
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| Lots of wash at the entrance and a big ol' dead tree!! Lots of debris in the cave passage also and very muddy! | Right off the bat we saw a couple of Big Ear Browns | and cave crickets |
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| and a few cave myotis. | Everyone looked quite healthy! | Even though it has not rained in months... |
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| We found evidence of a great flood since last bat count... water everywhere... | and water where we usually don't have any. | Train tunnel complete... now to pick up our guest Mel. Melynda Hickman joined us from the OK Dept. of Wildlife Conservation and is with the non-game division. She works in western OK. |
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| This coyote was a new guardian to the road to the resurgence. | We had our normal small clusters near the entrance just out of twilight zone. | These guys all look OK but we have the full size pictures available for scientists to really look at them for any signs of disease. |
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| Too many to count Andrew... we'll make that our first mat and get the packing density. | The packing density was low this year for this area of the cave. Plus it did not seem that there were as many mats compared to last year. | But we did note something a bit odd compared to past years... |
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| The mat groups were long and narrow... | and tended to really go into the cracks of the cave this year. | don't know what is up with that... |
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| They were even in areas really tight... hard to count them in those spots! | But we didn't see anything out of the ordinary with these bats.... | (other than they were weggie bats this year) |
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| My hand for a comparison in size. | John was our recorder and took out counts as we progressed though the cave. | We hit Pip Hall ... here we usually find lots of Tricolor bats (they used to be called Pips) |
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| A lot of them had dew on them... | It was warmer and more humid in this area too. Something you don't always see... a pair of pips.... err... tricolor. | This one only had dew on one side of his body...think you can tell where the air currents are moving?? |
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| Then down the hallway | These next pictures are some of the bats that we swabbed. | We swabbed 10 tricolor in this area to check for WNS moving into this area. |
