An illness is killing vast numbers of bats in New York State. Dying bats have been found in the snow in daylight hours.

By TINA KELLEY

Al Hicks was standing outside an old mine in the Adirondack Mountains, the largest bat hibernaculum, or winter resting place, in New York State. It was daylight in the middle of winter, and bats flew out of the mine at a rate of about one a minute. Some had fallen to the ground, where they flailed around on the snow like tiny wind-broken umbrellas .
All would be dead by nightfall. Mr. Hicks, a mammal specialist with the state’s Environmental Conservation Department, said: “Bats don’t fly in the daytime, and bats don’t fly in the winter. Every bat you see out here is a ‘dead bat flying,’ so to speak.
They have plenty of company. In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter.
Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont.
Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.
Researchers have yet to determine whether the bats are being killed by a virus, bacteria, toxin, environmental hazard, metabolic disorder or fungus. Some have been found with pneumonia, but that and the fungus are believed to be secondary symptoms.
Merlin Tuttle, the president of Bat Conservation International, an education and research group in Austin, Texas, said: “So far as we can tell at this point, this may be the most serious threat to North American bats we’ve experienced in recorded history. It definitely warrants immediate and careful attention.”
Last month, Mr. Hicks took a team from the Environmental Conservation Department into the hibernaculum that has sheltered 200,000 bats in past years, mostly little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) and federally endangered Indiana bats (Myotis sodalis), with the world’s second largest concentration of small-footed bats (Myotis leibii).
In a dank galley of the mine, Mr. Hicks asked everyone to count how many out of 100 bats had white noses. About half the bats in one galley did. They would be dead by April, he said.
Mr. Hicks, who was the first person to begin studying the deaths, said more than 10 laboratories were trying to solve the mystery. Some biologists fear that 250,000 bats could die this year.
Since September, when hibernation began, dead or dying bats have been found at 15 sites in New York. Most of them had been visited by people who had been at the original four sites last winter, leading researchers to suspect that humans could transmit the problem.
Biologists are concerned that if the bats are being killed by something contagious either in the caves or elsewhere, it could spread rapidly, because bats can migrate hundreds of kilometers in any direction to their summer homes, known as maternity roosts.
Researchers from institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, Boston University, the New York State Health Department and even Disney’s Animal World are addressing the problem. Some are considering trying to feed underweight wild bats to help them survive the remaining weeks before spring.
Some are putting temperature sensors on bats to monitor how often they wake up, and others are making thermal images of hibernating bats. In the six hours in the cave taking samples, nose counts and photographs, Mr. Hicks said that for him trying for the perfect picture was a form of therapy. “It’s just that I know I’m never going to see these guys again,” he said. “We’re the last to see this concentration of bats in our lifetime.”


Death in the Adirondacks

Biologists fear a significant die-off of bats in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Source: ‘‘The Wild Mammals of Missouri,’’ by
Charles W. Schwartz and Elizabeth R. Schwartz