Academy Building bat population going strong

SALISBURY — Devaughn Fraser loves bats, and she wants you to love them, too.

Fraser, a mammalian biologist with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), vowed to “change some minds” about the oft and unfairly maligned flying mammals at the third annual Bat Talk and Count on Thursday, July 25, in Salisbury.

“Bats aren’t flying rats, they don’t want to drink your blood, and they don’t get stuck in your hair,” Fraser informed the audience gathered at Salisbury’s Scoville Memorial Library, eager to dispel myths surrounding her favorite animal. “If one does swoop close to your head, it was probably saving you from that mosquito that was about to land on you.” In fact, all of Connecticut’s nine bat species eat only insects, and bats’ nationwide contribution to pest control is estimated to have an “economic value in the billions.”

However, nearly 50% of bat species are at risk of serious population decline within the next fifteen years, according to Fraser. A major contributing factor to this decline is the stateside appearance of white-nose syndrome, a deadly fungal disease, in 2006. “New York was ground zero for white-nose,” said Fraser. The disease was first attested in Connecticut in 2008, and only recently in Fraser’s native California.

On the west coast, management of emergent white-nose syndrome could involve preventive measures such as vaccines. In Connecticut, by contrast, the long-afflicted bat population already seems to be showing signs of adaptation, making habitat protection, technical assistance — by way of public education, land trusts, etc. — and population monitoring the preferred methods of mitigation.

To that end, and as the sun was nearly setting, the flock of newly-conscripted bat sympathizers was armed with flashlights and clickers and led from the library to Salisbury’s Academy Building.

Academy Building at night as bats are emerging.Sava Marinkovic

The Academy Building’s attic is the summer home of a colony of big brown bats — Connecticut’s most common cave bat species — and since 2022 Fraser has led local volunteers in an annual count of the colony’s population.

It’s possible, according to Fraser, that the colony roosting there represents an unbroken lineage of mothers and daughters stretching back to the attic’s very first inhabitants. “Some bat species can live up to forty years,” said Fraser, “and they return to the same roosts every summer.” Loyal to their origins, female offspring will then summer in the roosts of their mothers for generations.

As bats emerged, tumbling and diving, from beneath the Academy Building’s eaves to begin their nocturnal forage, volunteers tallied sightings and jogged the building premises seeking hotspots of activity. All-clicked, the population count came to 28, representing a relatively stable population based on prior counts.

Affording the rare opportunity to explore a winter bat cave, DEEP will be holding Bat Appreciation Day at Old New-Gate Prison and Copper Mine in East Granby, Connecticut, on Sunday, Sept. 15.