No Place Like Home
I arrived on Martha’s Vineyard on a cloudy, gray day in late October. Sailboats peppered the harbor amid seasonally vacant mooring buoys. Rather than being met by crowds of bustling tourists, Liz Olson waves to me from a quiet parking lot. We instantly recognize each other despite having never met — our rubber knee boots belie a common purpose. I am here to help Liz find a bat named Charlie who seems to be bucking all the norms.
Our quest is to understand why Charlie is still here. Those answers just might reveal a path to recovery for a species on the brink of local extinction.
We jump in Liz’s car, sand dusting the floor from a summer chasing shorebirds. We head for another ferry and the smaller island of Chappaquiddick. Leaving town, whale tail sculptures reveal the island’s seafaring history. The native Wampanoag’s continued presence is reflected in local names — Aquinnah, Squibnocket, Chappaquiddick. Beyond town, homes lie tucked into woodlots, beside ponds and beyond grassy fields at the end of meandering dirt driveways. Liz’s connections to the waves, the sand, the creatures and the land run generations deep, a commonality shared among many island natives. Childhood here is tightly intertwined with free-wandering exploration and nature. That experience has been staunchly protected by a number of island organizations working to preserve its character; about 30 percent of it is protected.
Riding the three-car ferry across a small channel, we head for the red maple where Charlie was found yesterday. Tucked off a private, wooded and winding footpath generations old, we listen for the “beep…beep…beep” of his radio. Silence answers. Charlie is wearing a radio transmitter, a sort of backpack that allows us to find him. Embarking on a search, we eventually land on Geoff and Norma Kontje’s property, in a wetland swale filled thick with undergrowth where he rests in the branch of another red maple.
Later we meet up with Luanne Johnson, Liz’s partner at the non-profit BiodiversityWorks. Luanne is an energetic blonde who in 1992 found her sense of home as part of this small community. As we set up vertical nets to capture bats along a wooded trail, she jumps from topic to topic and from net to net.
“Creativity is one of the things I love about this work”, she says. “Thinking outside the box — what’s this bat going to do, how am I going to catch them?” Together, she and Liz recount their adventures tracking otter, snakes, skunks and birds across the Vineyard.
“Skunks are very sweet-natured,” Luanne says. “Otters eat EVERYTHING … but matching wits with a willet is like nothing else. They are so stinking smart!”
Liz and Luanne’s adventures have led them into lots of back yards. No landowner has turned them away yet. “Our community is amazing in that respect”, Liz marvels. “When you knock, there’s only two to three degrees of separation between you and the person answering the door.” The most common response? “Oh, cool!”
Finding refuge on the coast
Charlie is a northern long-eared bat (or “northern” for short) who, like all New England bats, eats insects. To survive winter famines, he hibernates in the equivalent of a root cellar. Like many hibernating mammals, Charlie packs on the weight in Fall that allows him to “sleep” through the winter without food, until spring’s bounty returns insects to the landscape.
In 2006 a cold-loving fungus appeared on hibernating bats in upstate New York and began spreading rapidly across North America. Dubbed ‘white-nose syndrome’ for the “fuzz” that appears on their muzzles, the fungus causes a disease that has resulted in winter die-offs of 90–100 percent in many infected bat populations. It attacks the skin and causes bats to be unusually active, burning up critical fat stores needed for winter sustenance. Succumbing to the disease, northerns had largely disappeared from the northeast by 2011. By 2015 they had been added to the federal Endangered Species list as a threatened species. Around the same time, researchers began to realize that they were persisting on the Vineyard and other spots along the Atlantic coast — even in winter.
It used to be widely understood that most hibernating bats winter in caves and mines found only where geological or industrial history produced the right conditions — stable, cool temperatures and high humidity. In the fall, bats migrate from wide geographic areas to winter in groups of tens to multiple thousands at these limited sites. So biologists naturally expected that Island bats, lacking caves and mines nearby, would migrate to the mainland in fall. The closely related little brown bats that Luanne and Liz tracked did exactly that, gone by Labor Day, like so many island tourists.
On the Vineyard, the first head-scratching case of northerns was their discovery in a bluebird box in August 2012. In the following years, summer monitoring revealed that they were persisting, even reproducing here — but how? Since 2016, tantalizing clues have trickled in. Two years in a row, northerns were found on mild February days — one under a shingle, another in active flight. Next November, they were found hibernating in a basement. Contrary to expectations, 100 miles from the nearest hibernacula, they are wintering here. Have these bats found a way to survive a disease that has pushed the rest of their species to the brink of extinction? Liz and Luanne are hoping that Charlie may be the first bat to lead them directly to an answer.
Making a home for bats
For context, Luanne introduces me to Simon Hickman, who found northerns in his basement in 2017. Simon is an Englishman with tousled hair, a two-day beard and gentle eyes who lives in the house of an old whaling captain. He’d found bats under a ramshackle cottage built on his property in the 1970s. Gaining entry through the bilco doors, two northerns took up residence in the casing of an empty smoke detector. Two more settled themselves on the roughened sides of a wood joist. Luanne and Liz set up humidity and temperature loggers to record conditions, and Simon installed cameras to note behavior. Sure enough, basement conditions were just right. Further monitoring revealed that the bats were active even on mild winter days.
Was this how Vineyard northern bats were surviving? Is the coastal climate mild enough to allow occasional mid-winter, refueling hunts? Does the solitary nature of these few hibernating bats insulate them from the disease that ravenously destroys their tightly-packed cousins on the mainland? Are all the Vineyard’s northerns acting similarly?
Rather than relying solely on Charlie for answers, Liz and Luanne are also seeking the public’s help in answering these questions. Across the island, northerns could be sheltering in old houses just like Simon’s, some of which are demolished each year to make way for modern structures. (Even Simon needs to tear down his building because it’s no longer safe. He hopes to draw bats instead to the “Batz Carlton” that he has crafted under his art studio.) With the future of a species at stake, Liz and Luanne want to enlist plumbers, carpenters, masonry experts — anyone who might encounter bats in their work or in their home. They want answers: what kinds of spaces support wintering bats? How numerous are they? Can people play a role in supporting the recovery of a species on the brink?
Caring for wild things and wild places
As we wait in line for the Chappy Ferry one last time, rain sounding on the roof of the pickup truck, I think I understand why Charlie has stayed. It’s partly the coastal climate, but also being among neighbors who protect and care for the wild places on their cherished island, and people like Simon who welcome all the Island’s residents. Maybe people explain why northerns still have a place here.
As I reflect in the rain, a car stops in the middle of the road and a woman jumps out to wave at us, a big smile on her face. “So, do I have a bat?!” she excitedly asks, greeting Liz with a hug. This is Norma — steward of Charlie’s red maple in the swale. And so it goes.
Click here to learn more about bats and BiodiversityWorks research.
Marilyn Kitchell is a wildlife biologist and science communicator who studied bats in graduate school. She works at Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey.
