Glacier’s Bats: A Story of Grief and Hope

Headwaters

The twin stories of bats facing white-nose syndrome in Glacier, and a volunteer who dedicated so much of his life to studying them. With disease and decline on the horizon for bats, what does the future look like?

This episode is in memory of Lewis Young.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Gaby Eseverri: This spring and summer, park biologists were out all night trying to catch bats.

Lisa Bate: Tonight, we're trapping at roost. Our goal is 25. Yes. So what we're going to do is really we're going to catch 30 and then we're just anything after that, we're just going to we can look real quick and see if you see anything odd, if you do we'll collect it.

Lisa: We don't have Lewis with us. You guys are filling the shoes of Lewis.

Kaile Kimball: Nearly impossible shoes to fill.

Lisa: Big shoes to fill.

Gaby: They're catching these bats to do a swab test for white nose syndrome. A deadly disease that thus far hasn't been found in Glacier. But it's not too far away.

Gabby Eaton: Trapping went so well, I think that everyone worked together really hard and we had a good time.

Megan Potter: We're unbelievably efficient. We process a lot of bats. We saw no signs of white. We kept our bats very warm and very happy, very cozy.

Kaile: And how how were the bats? What you think?

Megan: Oh, they were amazing. Yeah, they were just the sweetest little things ever.

Gaby: And while I couldn't join them for the survey, I did catch up with them a few weeks later, when they texted me to run over to their office because the results of the tests were in.

Gaby [field]: I'm feeling nervous. I can't imagine how they're feeling.

Gaby: Lisa just texted us today that she just got the email, the email telling us if the bats here in Glacier National Park, if they have white nose or not.

[Footsteps and door creaking open.]

Mixed Voices: Okay. Hi. You actually been waiting? We haven't opened email yet. I want to be here for this. Please. Do you think he is? Really?

Gaby: Hey, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi. Did you guys hear? I got the results for white nose swabbing? Bat swabbing? Oh okay.

Gaby: When did you get the email?

Lisa: I've been in the field all week. And yesterday, when I got back, I noticed that it was in my inbox.

Lisa: Oh, I guess I'd better find it. I don't know... You can see how my emails reproduce in the inbox. Oh, it's from Emily. Maybe Emily. Yeah. Let's try this. There it is. It's from Emily. Oh, good. So I also took over Lewis Young, who passed away this year, and their house. They came back negative for PD. Hmm. Would you? They asked me to convey this information to Linda. And so I'll do that. Oh, maybe it's just that one, you guys. This is just at his house. Oh, sorry. False alarm guys.

Mixed Voices: Oh, okay. That's really good. Okay. So, yeah.

Gaby: False alarm. The results for the bats tested in Glacier aren't back yet. But it's still great news from another site in northwest Montana, the home of Lewis Young.

Gaby: Welcome to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I'm Gaby.

[Theme music fades in.]

Gaby: This episode is about bats. Disease and decline are on the horizon for Glacier's bats and their future seems uncertain. Lisa says it's not a matter of if, but when. This story is also about one man who loved bats, who dedicated so much of his life to conserving them.

[Theme music plays in full.]

Madeline Vinh: Act One: Dusk.

Gaby: Glacier's wildlife team hosts an event called "Going Batty" every summer. The public comes and gets to see bats up close. As the sun sets they welcome the attendees and give us all a short introduction. Their enthusiasm spreads throughout the entire crowd.

Lisa: The main focus is just to give people a chance to see bats up close and learn about the amazing role they play in our ecosystems and some of the risks and threats they face and what people can do to help bats. And there's an old saying that you kill what you fear and you fear what you don't understand. So we take this as an opportunity to help people understand bats.

Gaby: That's Lisa Bate. She's a wildlife biologist with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. She's in perpetual motion, and her staff, who are half her age, have trouble keeping up with her. She studies the park's birds, and if those 250 plus species weren't enough to keep track of, she added ten species of bats to that list as well.

Lisa: So far we have documented ten species and that's why we started the bat inventory and monitoring program. I came to the park in 2009 and I've always loved bats. I was the nerdy little kid in the meadow putting rocks in socks and throwing them up in the air and watching the bats come after them. I never really understood why I thought they like them because they were white socks. But, you know, I didn't know about echolocation back then.

Gaby: I feel like bats get a bad rap. I think it comes from their associations with Halloween and vampires and like the general nighttime, but they're really remarkable. There are more than 1400 species of bats in the world. Bats are the only mammals that fly. They're expert echo locators and they pollinate over 500 plant species. So the next time you eat mangoes, avocados or bananas, you should thank a bat. And if you need another reason to love them, they eat millions of insects, every night.

Lisa: I mean, I'm amazed at what scientists have learned about bats just in the years that I've been studying them. You know, we didn't know a lot, but there was just been this race against time to learn as much as we can before we lose species or, you know, massive amounts of populations of bats. But when I got to the park, I started hearing about this disease called white nose syndrome. Have you guys...

Gaby: And white nose syndrome is terrifying. It's a non-native fungal infection that is killing bats as it spreads all across North America.

Lisa: It was discovered in a cave in New York in 2006. And it just some cavers went into a cave and saw these bats just hanging there. And they had this white powdery fungus growing on their nose. So they alerted biologists to it. Biologists started going in the caves and saying, oh, yeah, something's really wrong here.

[Somber synth music fades in.]

Gaby: This fungus loves cold, dark and damp places. So it infects bats while they're hibernating over the winter, often in caves when they're all together. Lisa likes to say that a big brown bat, for example, needs the equivalent amount of fat of one pat of butter to make it through to spring. But when that fungus infects a bat, it makes them restless and active, burning that fat that it needs to survive the winter. This can mean starvation.

Lisa: And any time about arouses from hibernation, they are using critical calories to get them through the winter. Think of that little pat of butter. I mean, how long would a pat of butter last us? Not very long.

Gaby: But the White Nose syndrome response team has a map that shows how the fungus has spread since 2006. In 2010, it reached Missouri. In 2017, it reached Texas. And in 2020 it reached Montana. And where white nose has spread, their populations have been decimated. At some sites, it's killed between 90 and 100% of the population. And even though it's not in the park yet, we know it's coming.

[Somber synth music fades out.]

Lisa: We really knew nothing. No formal surveys had ever been conducted. We had like visuals of four species and acoustic recordings of two others. And of those four visuals, one bat, the big brown bat was roadkill. So that was our database. And I was like, Oh my gosh. So I started collaborating with the biologists in Waterton, and then in stepped the Glacier National Park Conservancy, and they funded the first bat inventories here in the park, and that was in 2011.

Gaby: But Lisa couldn't do all of this on her own. The Conservancy support was critical, and so were the contributions of other scientists, including Lewis Young.

[Light synth music fades in.]

Lisa: I took over the program and then with volunteers, mainly Lewis Young. He's a retired Forest Service biologist, and he has been such an integral part of Glacier's bat inventory monitoring program. And I'd really like to honor him tonight. We lost him in April very unexpectedly, but without him there behalf of the bat program here at the park. And then Leah Breidinger, she stepped in and started helping, Lewis taught you a lot, I know, too. And, Gabby, you learned from Lewis. So a lot of us have really grown under the teachings of Lewis. So, you know, we're all just trying to fill his shoes, which are huge shoes to fill.

Gaby: Lewis loved bats. He worked with a lot of animals in a long career as a wildlife biologist. But he called bats the underdog of mammals, and he always rooted for the underdog. I remember meeting him last year at Going Batty that year, and every time he trapped bats, actually, he wore a certain accessory.

Lisa: Usually when we were here, he would do the fun fact part and wear his big bad hat.

Gabby: He had like these hats that are fuzzy black bats with wings out the sides and then little eyeballs. It's like he was a giant bat. Yeah. Yeah.

Gaby: It's like he wanted the bats to feel at home in his presence, and he welcomed them into his yard as well, which he basically turned into a bat sanctuary.

Gabby: So, Lewis, he was the bat house expert here in Montana.

Gaby: When I was a student at the University of Florida, I would often bike by a section of campus where the air was particularly pungent. There are three bat houses each, a little bit bigger than the size of a dorm room mounted on poles 20 feet above the ground. Together, they house almost half a million bats. These are way bigger than a backyard bat house, but they all provide bats with safe places to live. With their natural habitats in decline, setting up a secure and consistent home for them is an act of kindness, of love.

Lisa: I love going to his house. He had what I called a bad house garden. It's funny, one of my techs said that to and she went looking for flowers. I'm like, "No," he just had three massive bad houses up on post, 20 feet up.

Gaby: Decades ago, he and his wife Linda, built a small bat house in their backyard, but they quickly realized it wasn't enough. So soon after, they added a medium sized one, then a double. Then the condo went up. Lewis suspected that there were about 1200 bats living in their yard, and Linda joked that her neighbors, blissfully unaware of these extra residents, never had a mosquito problem. How many ways do you show those you love that you care about them? Lewis showed up for bats in every facet of his life. Volunteering countless hours, collecting data and training other scientists, helping raise public awareness and providing a refuge for them at his own home.

[Somber synth music fades in.]

Madeline Vinh: Act Two: Dark.

Gaby: It's dark now and people are starting to reach for their jackets. There are bugs everywhere, which is kind of annoying for me, but really good news for bats and for the scientists trying to catch them. They'll assess each bat and gather data on the population before releasing them back into the night. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I start seeing blurry figures rapidly flying above me. I'm torn between wonder and worry for their fate.

Gaby [field]: What's a good spot? What defines a good spot?

Gabby: Oh, a place that bats would be flying to forage on insects or to get a drink of water.

Gaby: That's Gabby Eaton. She works with Lisa on the wildlife team. They use something called a mist net to catch bats because the nets are so fine that they're basically impossible to see, especially in the dark.

Gabby: So sometimes we look for places in the trees where there's openings, and then on water, we just kind of think of where they might be flying out from the woods to forage over the water here.

Gaby [field]: So this net is set up under a bridge. Has it been successful in the past?

Gabby: Yeah, I think that's why we did it. Yeah.

[Distant train horn and bird song.]

Gaby: They're hung in strategic places where bats might be flying. So in the forest or under the bridge where the smooth water of McDonald Creek slips by.

Lisa: We just saw our first bat of the night here at the bridge this year, and they've been seeing bats up there in the forest longer.

Gaby: So now I am walking over with Lisa over to their truck and they have all of these tools and equipment ready because it's time to process the bats.

Lisa: ... we try to process them as soon as possible...

Gaby: Okay. The wildlife team keeps the bats in little cloth bags where they really seem content. If it's a cold night, Lisa will tuck the baggies inside the top of her waders to keep the bats warm. In processing them. The team will measure their wings, calculate their weight, determine their sex, and so much more. All of this information helps clue them in to what species it is.

Leah Breidinger: So the first thing we do is weight, right, Lisa?

Lisa: Yeah.

Leah: Well, put it on the scale in the bag and zero it. Then we'll take the bat out. There's our little bat.

Mixed Voices: Oh it's so cute, little buddy!

Gaby: This is my favorite part of the night, and I suspect it's everyone else's too. Lisa dims her headlamp and inspects each bat carefully. They're adorable, in an ugly-cute kind-of-way. They have shiny, soft looking brown fur with leathery wings and little wrinkly noses like a pug. Someone on the internet called them sky puppies.

Lisa: Do you hear that sounds. Thanks for letting us know.

[High pitched bat chittering sounds.]

Gabby: Okay. 7.8 grams.

Lisa: 7.8?

Gabby: Yeah.

[High pitched bat chittering sounds.]

Lisa: What happened? Oh, they're swarming. Oh, because it's emitting distress calls. Oh, yeah. Sorry, little guy.

[Synth music fades.]

Gaby: Watching them feels like opening a doorway into a world I so rarely see. Everything that goes on while I sleep each night. To have up close what is normally a shadow flitting by is to see a sliver of darkness in light. This little creature has such a different experience on this earth than my own. Hunting by echolocation and thriving in the pitch dark. Where I am helpless.

[High pitched bat chittering sounds.]

Lisa: I'm sure it's a female... looks like a female.

Mixed Voices: [Sounds of handling a bat.].

Mixed Voices: Female? Female.

[High pitched bat chittering sounds.]

Lisa: Then we're going to check for reproductive status, see if she's pregnant. I doubt she's pregnant. She would have pups by now. We palpate the abdomen.

Leah: So I kind of just feel like that and I don't feel anything. You usually can feel something pretty hard in the stomach if they are pregnant. So. No, not pregnant, is what I would say.

Gaby: At Going Batty last year I watched as Lewis processed one of the bats. He gently but quickly assessed the bat, but something seemed different. They released it and he kept reviewing the measurements he'd taken. A few days later, I got an all employee email with great news. Lewis had identified a new species in the park, a western, small-footed myotis. Even knowing the inevitable future of these bats, he was still working so hard to study and protect them.

Lisa: And then look at the nipples, then we can tell--and this is one of the hardest things on earth to do, find a nipple on a bat. We can tell if you can see the nipple, we know she has given birth at least once. A young female that has never given birth, you really can't even find the nipple. And then you look for the hair around the nipple and you can and you can even squeeze the nipple to see if they're still lactating.

Gaby: There are tears throughout the night as memories of Lewis come up. The team quietly honors him in practicing the techniques he taught them. His expertise and enthusiasm are missed, and so is his kindness.

Gaby: When did you meet him?

Gabby: I first met Lewis when I was the conservation intern through the Conservancy. I was a freshman, so I was like 19. He's a retired wildlife biologist who just volunteered with Lisa and loves bats more than any other person that I've ever met.

Gaby: Really?

Gabby: Yeah.

Gaby: His wife, Linda, told me that he didn't start working with bats until a ways into his career, after a moment in 1980 when he came home as excited as she'd ever seen him. He'd found a bat trapped in a fence and managed to successfully release it. Something about that moment started a 40 year devotion and many sleepless nights.

Gabby: He just was incredibly passionate about helping bats, and that's really all he cared about. I mean, he cared. He cared about other things, too. But yeah, it was like his main focus. And he was just a wonderful person to be around. Mm hmm.

Gaby: Does this year feel different?

Gabby: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, he would do the the bat facts with his bat hat on, and he was really soft spoken. So I think people had a hard time hearing him. But he had, like, all of the facts memorized by heart. And it was just so cool that he knew all of that.

Gaby: Because he just lived and breathed bats.

Gabby: We had a training for a white nose swabbing this spring, and he had such an impact that at the beginning of the training they said, we just want to let everyone know, Lewis passed away. And we were all so, so... were grieving him because he was such an amazing part of the whole, like, Montana's bat community. So, yeah. Far reaching. Yeah. Yeah. His wife donated all of his bat tracking gear to us, and so I had to go through all of that. And Lisa didn't want to go through it because it was like too hard for her to kind of look at it. But he had all these little trinkets and stuff in little notes inside his trapping gear that were just like, It was really sweet to see all that.

Gaby: One thing that Gabby found were holding bags for the bats. Linda made a bunch of them by hand years ago, using fabrics with all kinds of patterns and colors. The team's favorite is the Mickey Mouse one. Lewis had his own set of nets as well. And the team tells me they've used his, all summer.

Gabby: He's an inspiration, and I hope to be as amazing as he was and his legacy is. Yeah...

[Music fades in.]

Gaby: Linda was kind enough to tell me more about who Lewis was when he wasn't wearing the bat hat. He grew up in the Ozarks and was always passionate about animals. They met in grade school, she says sixth, and he says fifth. But she always knew she loved him. He was the cutest boy in school. They started dating in high school and married after graduating. She put him through college while he studied wildlife biology, and she would have been totally shocked if he had picked anything else. Throughout their lives, they observed the natural world, always together.

[Music plays and concludes.]

Lisa: Mites? Insects? Parasites?

Leah: I did see one mite, I'm not I'm not finding the nipples, Lisa.

Lisa: Well, she's old.

Leah: Well.

Lisa: Can I look at her?

Leah: Yeah!

Lisa: She's not obviously pregnant. I mean so often it just stands right out. But, you know, it was... Oh, there is a nipple right there. Now squeeze it a little. Did you see milk come out? No.

Leah: No.

Lisa: No. Okay. So she has...

Gaby: The tiniest thing.

Lisa: Well, was really hard to find, but she obviously hasn't given birth this year.

Gaby: They don't seem to love being handled and they make chirping sounds and try to nibble Lisa's gloved hands. But it doesn't take long to process each bat, and they do one final test before letting them go. It's unusual to detect white nose during the summer months. That's why they swab for it in the spring. But they look for it just in case.

Leah: So you can check for white nose syndrome by using the UV light and it'll fluoresce orange. But we've got to turn off our headlamps to do that.

Lisa: In this light, you don't want in anybody's eyes. And this is when we do our swabbing. This is our last step. Oh, that looks really clean.

Leah: So we'd be seeing orange flecks if it had white nose.

Lisa: Let's look at the other wing. I don't see any scarring either, but it did have nubby ears, right?

Leah: Yes, it did.

Lisa: And we record all that. Okay.

Leah: It's always great when you don't find it.

Gaby: For a few moments. It's quiet and everyone holds their breath while they wait to find out. This bat doesn't seem to have it yet. But I try not to think about what could happen this winter or to the 1200 bats that live in Lewis's backyard. Well, those houses be empty someday. Are they safe?

[Footsteps walking on gravel.]

Lisa: Okay, Now you want to release her? Yeah.

Gaby: Lisa and I turn off our headlamps and walk to the edge of the forest to release the bat. There's no light, no chirping, no noise. Everything is quiet. She pauses for a moment, as though she's saying goodbye, and then sets it free. I wonder where it will go.

[Synth music fades in and out.]

Madeline Vinh: Act Three: Dawn.

Gaby: I knew this day was coming. And it's here. It's a cool, clear morning and I soak in the warm sunlight peeking over the ridge as I walk over to meet the wildlife team. We're about to find out the news we've been waiting for.

[Footsteps walking on gravel.]

Gaby: So I'm walking over to Lisa's office because she messaged me that she finally got the real email.

Gaby: Are you feeling nervous now that...

Lisa: You're here? Yeah, I always get nervous. This is from the National Wildlife Health Center. And this is where we sent our swab test to go. And these are our results to find out--

Gaby: --so this was from the swabs that you collected in earlier this spring.

Lisa: Yeah, on the east side.

Gaby: And so right before, what do you think is waiting for you inside of this email?

Lisa: I think it's going to be negative. And the reason why is because I have not received any phone calls.

Gaby: I see Lewis his legacy everywhere as I look around at the team. Their courage and dedication in the face of everything that is to come. Their hope for the future and their love and commitment to these sky puppies. Lewis His passion was contagious. Linda tells me that he loved working with Lisa and mentoring the young wildlife technicians, but that was the best part.

Lisa: Oh look, great news: "Thanks for all you do for bats!" Yay!

Gaby: Aww! Oh wow!

Lisa: That's really good. Yeah...

Gaby: Lisa's teary eyed, and so am I. I think of Lewis, and I'm comforted that this news would have brought him joy.

Lisa: Yeah. This is great news for Glacier.

Gaby: So why is this good news if it sort of feels inevitable?

Lisa: Our hope is that our North American bats build natural immunity against white nose syndrome. So the more time we have here in Glacier without the disease here, maybe some of those bats are developing immunity.

[Theme music fades in.]

Gaby: Even in some of the areas that were hit the hardest by white nose. Scientists are now finding that bat populations are slowly, ever so slowly, starting to come back.

Lisa: So we're just watching and waiting, and hoping for the best for these guys...

Gaby: Linda tells me that she still loves watching the bats emerge from the houses in her backyard. I like to think they remind her of Lewis.

[Ending theme music builds under credits.]

Peri Sasnett: This episode is in memory of Lewis Young.

Peri: Special thanks to Lynda Young for generously sharing her memories and stories with us. Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacey Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you.

Peri: Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our shownotes.

Peri: Lisa Bate, Kaile Kimbal, Gabby Eaton, Megan Potter and the whole wildlife team were instrumental, and many thanks to the very batty Sarah Gaulke for answering all of our bat questions and for encouraging us to tell this story. And an extra shout out to Madeline Vinh for coming through in the clutch.

Peri: Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

Kaile: It's definitely worth staying up late for, yeah. Oh, my goodness. This is amazing. This is the best moment of my life. I'm in love. I'm going to cry.