Indiana Bats Listen to the program: Program aired on September 17, 2001 and September 16, 2002. To listen to the program, you need Real Player. Click on the Real Player image for a free download. There's a new colony in central Pennsylvania—a new colony of Indiana bats, that is. Despite their Mid-western origins, these tiny, dull-gray, flying mammals are found in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. And they do have a lot of friends in the Pennsylvania Game Commission where researchers take a special interest in the habits and habitats of this endangered species. Recently, they discovered the first-ever known instance of Indiana bats using a building—the Canoe Creek Church, in fact—as a maternity roost. Normally, their nurseries are found in mature forests, prime sites for human development, which poses a problem for the bats. | Background info | References and further reading |

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Indiana bats

Indiana bats, like all other bats, are mammals; they feed their young milk, have fur, lungs, and are warm-blooded. The Indiana bat looks a lot like its relative the little brown bat, but is slightly smaller and its color is a little more gray.

The Indiana bat is an endangered species, which means it is in danger of becoming extinct. This is why researchers at the Canoe Creek Church in Blair County, Pennsylvania, were quite excited when they found the Indiana bats sharing a maternity colony with little brown bats. Up until then, people had thought that the Indiana bats were only roosting under the peeling bark of dead and dying trees, a habitat that is disappearing in some places, but the bats in Canoe Creek Church show that they have found a new place to give birth to their young.

Indiana bats have an interesting feature called "delayed fertilization." The Indiana bats mate during fall, but the females don't get pregnant right away. First, the bats will hibernate; they will sleep all through the winter in caves or abandoned mines. The female bats store the sperm through the winter and only become pregnant in spring, soon after coming out of hibernation.

In the spring, the bats migrate to their summer areas, usually north of the hibernation sites. The male bats will roost alone or in small groups, while the female bats may roost in groups of up to 100 bats. Such a group of female bats is called a nursery or maternity colony, and it is here that the young are born in late June.

Why endangered_

The Indiana bats have become endangered for a variety of reasons, including loss or degradation of their habitat, human disturbance, and pesticides. Disturbance seems to be one of the main threats to the Indiana bats, primarily because their habit to hibernate in large numbers in only a few caves makes them extremely vulnerable to disturbance; one single event can disturb many of the sleeping animals. Because the Indiana bats only give birth to one or two young each year, it also takes a long time for the bats to increase their population when a disturbance or loss of habitat has decreased their numbers.

For more information on the threats to Indiana bats, read the endangered species facts on the Indiana bat.

References and further reading

For more information and links about bats in general, visit Watershed Radio's Bats Return.

The following articles have more information on the Indiana bat:

• Game Commission's Indiana Bat Research Draws National Attention
  by Joe Kosak, May 17, 2001
• Pennsylvania Game Commission information on bats
• Endangered species facts: Indiana bat
  by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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