A grant from Columbia Basin Trust will be used to boost the basin’s bat population.
Wildlife Conservation Society Canada has received $210,000 through CBT’s Ecosystem Enhancement grants to build new homes for bats.
Director of Bat Conservation Cori Lausen says this will help female bats and offspring who are losing their homes due a decreasing number of old growth trees.
“They’re almost 20% of our small mammal diversity in the province,” Lausen says. “So there’s a significant component of that. On top of that, they’re ecologically important, we do depend on flying furry friends to make sure that we have insect control that’s natural, rather then having to depend on pesticides and biocides.”
Lausen says they will be creating new bat homes in the southern basin area, while monitoring homes which were installed last year in the Golden-Donald area.
“We installed kind of mimic trees, if you will, using a flex bark polymer that mimics what an old growth tree would provide in terms of cavities,” she say. “We’re also modifying smaller trees that are not going to be useful for bats unless we put in some very specific types of crevices that we think bats will use.”
You can learn more about Wildlife Conservation Society Canada’s efforts to protect bats here.
– Cori Lausen, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada Director of Bat Conservation
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