Montana State Library

Montana's bat populations face a wide array of conservation challenges, including loss of roosting sites, elimination of prey species, collision or drowning hazards at sites where they forage, drink, and mate, and a lack of baseline information on distribution and habitat use that is available to resource managers. In recent years, concerns have focused on fatalities at wind turbine facilities and those resulting from White-nose Syndrome (WNS). WNS has killed an estimated 5.7 to 6.7 million bats in eastern North America and 600,000 to 888,000 bats are estimated to have been killed at wind energy facilities across the United States in 2012 alone. These and other sources of mortality may be having significant impacts on bat populations because bats are long-lived and have only one or two young per year. Given these concerns, detectors were installed at nine sites in proximity to active, inactive, or remediated coal mines or proposed project areas across Southcentral Montana. These detectors are part of a regional network deployed over multiple years to document activity patterns of bats across Montana, and portions of northern Idaho, and the western Dakotas. agency and its staff. We extend considerable thanks to Chris Yde for facilitating this work, providing feedback on project implementation, and recognizing the importance of gathering year-round baseline information on bat activity in the region. We would also like to thank Mike Glenn for his assistance in detector placement, maintaining detector sites and collecting data, and Ashley Eichhorn for assistance with grants administration. Staff at Wildlife Acoustics assisted with questions regarding the SM2Bat+ ultrasonic detector/recorders and the SMX-US and SMX-U1 microphones and WAC to WAV and Kaleidoscope Pro software. Joe Szewczak provided Sonobat 4.1 software, feedback on its use, and the 2011 Humboldt State University Bat Lab's echolocation call characteristic summaries for western and eastern U.S. bats that we used to develop the call characteristic summary for Montana bats. John Horel with the MesoWest Research Group assisted with acquisition of weather station data through the MesoWest application programming interface. At the Montana Natural Heritage Program, Darlene Patzer assisted with grant administration, Shannon Hilty assisted with hand review of bat calls, and Dave Ratz assisted with