The United Nations has declared 2011-2012 as the Year of the Bat to promote conservation of this important mammal.
Some interesting facts about bats from Bat Conservation International:
* Contrary to popular misconceptions, bats:
- are not blind
- do not become entangled in human hair
- seldom transmit disease to other animals or humans.
* More than 1,200 species of bats account for almost 20% of all mammal species, and most are highly beneficial.
* Bats play essential roles in keeping populations of night-flying insects in balance worldwide.
* A single little brown bat can catch more than 1,000 mosquito-sized insects in just one hour.
* A colony of 150 big brown bats can protect farmers from up to 33 million rootworms each summer.
* All mammals can contract rabies; however, the vast majority of bats do not; even bats that do contract the disease will normally bite only in self-defense. They pose little threat to people who do not handle them.
* Bats are exceptionally vulnerable to extinction, in part because they are the slowest-reproducing mammals on Earth for their size. Most produce only one pup per year.
Bat Conservation International has many free informational flyers available on a variety of topics, including safe and humane exclusions from buildings.
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 | | Chickadee |
RFID technology tracks who is coming for dinner
Whatever you may think about RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) being used to track items in stores, most people would agree that using them to learn more about birds' feeding habits is a good use of the technology.
Scientists and students at the Cornell Lab have collected data on hundreds of thousands of feeder visits so far by Black-capped Chickadees and other birds.
Tiny tags weighing less than one-tenth of a gram are attached to the birds' legs and are detected each time the birds visit specially-rigged feeders.
Since initiating a pilot study of the technology in November of 2009, more than 120 Black-capped Chickadees, White-breasted Nuthatches, House Finches, and Tufted Titmice have been tagged and more than 2.5 million visits to the wired feeders have been recorded!
Initial results from the pilot season show that individual birds may take up to 200 black-oil sunflower seeds per day. Many of these seeds were certainly stored (cached) for later consumption. Most chickadees tended to be faithful to one or two feeding stations located within 100 m (109 yards) of one another, but several birds abandoned one feeder site and moved as far as 1 km (0.6 mi) to another feeding location.
VIDEO: Tracking Feeder Birds with RFID
This excellent video (less than 5 minutes) from Cornell's Lab of Ornithology describes the RFID technique and what we can learn by keeping track of who's coming to dinner.
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 | | Black cherry (Prunus serotina) |
Interesting reads about native plants and wildlife gardens
Winter is a good time to read about gardening, since we're not outside actually gardening. Here are some short pieces of interest from the Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens blog:
Winter Interest Shminterest - Benjamin Vogt describes his delight in his winter garden, which provides interest for people, but also habitat for wildlife.
Black Cherry vs. Bradford Pear - Pat Sutton describes the many values of black cherry and contrasts it with the problems created by the much more commonly planted Bradford pear.
Seeing Nature's Patterns and Processes - Sue Reed, author of the excellent book Energy-Wise Landscape Design, explores the patterns she sees in nature.
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"In our efforts to make [our lawn] greener, to make it all grass, to keep it closely mowed, and to make it a constant companion of suburban development, we are unnecessarily contributing to some of the most severe environmental problems facing the world today."
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Native Plants Symposium