Good news for bats

Little brown bats were once the most widespread .bat species in New York State, but its population has declined about 90 percent since the discovery of white-nose syndrome in a cave south of Albany several years ago.

Little brown bats in hibernation. Photo by Larry Master.

Now there may be a bit of good news: the latest survey of caves in the Albany region detected an increase .in the number of little browns.

“While we remain cautiously optimistic of encouraging trends for some species seen more recently, it will likely take several years before we fully know how to interpret this,” said Kathleen Moser, assistant commissioner of natural resources for the state Department of Environmental Conservation. 

DEC’s full news release follows.

DEC REPORTS: 2012 WINTER BAT SURVEY RESULTS

The results of the winter survey of hibernating bats in New York are now available, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) announced today.  This survey was a cooperative effort among state wildlife officials, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and numerous volunteers to monitor the effects of white-nose disease, a fungal infection that has devastated regional bat populations since it was first documented in New York in 2006.

The most encouraging observations came from surveys of the five hibernation caves in the greater Albany area where the disease was first discovered. Previous reports have suggested that little brown bat counts at these sites seem to be stabilizing in recent years. This year’s surveys saw substantial increases in little brown bats at three out of five of these caves. The largest and best documented of these sites saw an increase from 1,496 little brown bats in 2011 to 2,402 this year.  It is premature to conclude that population recovery is underway for this species, however, because of the small number of hibernation sites that have experienced increases and the fact that alternate explanations are plausible.  Bats are highly social animals and observed increases could be the result of consolidation of individuals from other hibernation sites, for example.

“While we remain cautiously optimistic of encouraging trends for some species seen more recently, it will likely take several years before we fully know how to interpret this,” said Kathleen Moser, DEC’s Assistant Commissioner of Natural Resources.  “DEC is assisting in national bat research and with those seeking solutions to the effects of the white nose disease.  As a preventative measure we can take now, we encourage the public who enter caves recreationally, to refrain from entering hibernation sites while bats are there.”

Based on this year’s survey, total observed declines in population attributed to the disease for tri-colored bats have been revised upward.  Prior to the arrival of white-nose disease in 2007, a total of 2,285 tri-colored bats were counted at 37 representative hibernation sites in the state.  Since that time, a total of 112 bats were observed during surveys of those same sites, suggesting a statewide decline of 95 percent for the species. Northern long-eared bats have also been affected with a 98 percent observed decline (18 individuals observed in 36 sites compared to a pre-disease total of 911 bats at the same sites).  Although neither bat was considered a threatened species prior to the arrival of white-nose disease, both species are now extremely rare in New York.

No surveys were performed this year for the federal and state endangered Indiana bat. Previous surveys indicate that losses for this species have totaled 71 percent statewide (15,650 individuals remaining, down from a high of 54,689).  The population status of Indiana bats in New York will be reassessed in 2013.

Records of small-footed bats, a rare species even prior to the disease, show only a relatively small decline of 13 percent.  This species is difficult to count due to its secretive habits when hibernating, but focused survey efforts this season have bolstered previous observations that the impact of the disease is far less severe for small-footed’s than for most other hibernating bats.

Prior to the arrival of white-nose disease, the little brown bat was the most common bat species in New York State and has been observed hibernating in more than 100 caves and mines here.  Statewide losses for the species attributed to white-nose disease remain at approximately 90 percent. For more information on white nose syndrome in New York, visit the DEC website at http://www.dec.ny.gov/animals/45088.html.

DEC wants to expand bobcat harvest

Map shows proposed changes in regulations for hunting and trapping bobcats. NYSDEC.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation wants to allow more hunting and/or trapping of bobcats in many parts of the state, including the Adirondacks.

In a draft five-year management plan, DEC reports that the state’s bobcat population—now estimated to be five thousand—has been growing, especially in the Southern Tier. Roughly twice the size of housecats, bobcats prey on a variety of species, from small voles to white-tailed deer.

A bobcat. Photo from NYSDEC.

DEC says up to 20 percent of the state’s bobcats (i.e., a thousand animals) could be killed by hunters and trappers each year without hurting the population. In recent years, sportsmen have harvested between four hundred and five hundred a year. Under its proposed plan, DEC estimates that this tally would increase by less than a hundred, still well below the critical threshold.

As indicated by the map above, the trapping season in the Adirondacks and the rest of the North Country would be extended. The season now runs from October 25 to December 10. Under the plan, it would be extended to February 15. The hunting season will not change.

The trapping season in the Adirondacks had been shorter than elsewhere to protect fishers. Since the fisher population has rebounded, the department feels that rationale no longer obtains.

The plan also calls for extending both the hunting and trapping seasons in central Tug Hill to February 15.

In the biggest change, DEC wants to initiate hunting and trapping of bobcats in much of the Southern Tier, where the population has increased dramatically over the past decade. “What began as occasional sightings along the New York/Pennsylvania border has progressed to large numbers of observations, trail camera photos, and incidental captures and releases by trappers,” the proposed plan says. “Over the past five years there have been 332 bobcat observations documented in the harvest expansion area.”

DEC also seeks to allow hunting and trapping of bobcats in the region just north of New York City.

The public has until February 16 to comment on the proposal.

 Click the link below to read the plan (PDF file).

 bobcat plan

Yes, this is a snowy year

In his latest Birdwatch column for the Explorer, John Thaxton said we might see an influx of snowy owls this winter. The man is a soothsayer.

Snowy owls live in the Canadian tundra, but once in a while they migrate south in great numbers in search of food. This is one of those “irrupution” years.

A snowy owl. Photo by Larry Master.

National Public Radio reported last week that snowy owls have been sighted in many states this winter, from Maine to Washington State and as far south as Oklahoma.

Jim McCormac, a biologist with the Ohio Division of Wildlife, told NPR that the owl’s movements are influenced by the lemming populations in the far north. Most likely, he said, “there was a superabundance of lemmings this year up in the Arctic. And there were so many lemmings that the owls in response will lay more eggs, so there’s a lot more young owls. And so there’s not enough food to get through the winter, so a lot of them come south.”

Before Thaxton wrote his column in early December, there already had been three sightings in our region. Larry Master, a Lake Placid birder, said snowy owls are usually seen during irruption years along the edges of the Adirondack Park, including the Champlain Valley. They also may frequent  the St. Lawrence Seaway. “Snowy owls are birds of the open tundra and don’t feel comfortable in woods,” Master said.  “I’ve never seen one in the Tri-Lakes area, although a friend saw one a few years ago on the Whiteface Inn golf course–a one-day wonder.”

Although the irruption is good news for birders, they should be careful not to stress the owls. McCormac noted that when snowies arrive this far south they usually are emaciated and hungry. “Photographers, avid birders, give the birds a lot of distance, don’t disrupt them, cause them to fly, things like that because that’s another peril that they face,” he said.

With their white plumage, snowy owls blend in with the arctic landscape. Given our dearth of snow this winter, they might find it difficult to camouflage themselves in these parts.

Biologist to talk about big cats

Wildlife biologist Paul Jensen will give a lecture on “Big Cats of the Adirondacks” at the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts in Blue Mountain Lake at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, January 29.

Jensen will talk about the historical distribution of mountain lions, Canada lynx, and bobcats in the Northeast and how these species may be affected by changes in the landscape and the climate in the years ahead.

Cougar

Mountain lions and Canada lynx no longer live in the Adirondacks, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Last year, however, officials confirmed that a mountain lion struck by a car in Connecticut had passed through the Lake George region. The cat had migrated east from South Dakota.

Jensen, a senior wildlife biologist with DEC, has been researching martens and fishers in the Adirondacks as part of a doctoral program at McGill University in Montreal.

The Adirondack Museum is sponsoring the lecture. Because of construction at the museum, the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts is hosting the event. Museum members and children of elementary-school age or younger will be admitted free. The fee for others is $5.

For more information, call (518) 352-7311 or visit www.adirondackmuseum.org.

John Davis finishes TrekEast

John Davis bikes through Florida. Photo by Ron Sutherland.

After hiking, biking, canoeing, and sailing 7,600 miles over 280 days, John Davis says the hard work has just begun.

Davis resigned as the Adirondack Council’s conservation director last year to undertake TrekEast, a muscle-powered journey designed to draw attention to the need to protect wild lands in the eastern United States and Canada.

John Davis traveled from Florida to the Gaspe Peninsula.

He began his travels on February 3 in Key Largo, Florida, and finished this past Monday (November 14) on Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula. In between, he meandered through swamps, fields, and forests, along coastlines, and over mountains. He reached New York State in the summer and traveled through the Catskills, Shawangunks, and Adirondacks.

“While I’ve seen numerous threats to wild nature over the past ten months, I’ve also seen incredible efforts under way to counter those threats,” Davis said after reaching the Atlantic Ocean at Forillon National Park in Quebec.

In an interview with the Explorer, Davis said one lesson from his journey is that the East needs to bring back cougars to restore ecological balance. Without cougars to keep them in check, he said, deer are overbrowsing the woods, consuming wildflowers and saplings. “Our forests are likely to slowly degenerate,” he said.

Davis said conservationists need to focus on four other objectives in the East:

• Protect large tracts of wild land and the wild corridors connecting them.
• Create wildlife crossings over and under roads.
• Protect waterways with wild buffers.
• Encourage private landowners to protect wild lands.

Davis said TrekEast, though arduous, was the adventure of a lifetime. “Now comes the much more important and difficult leg of the trip—maintaining and growing the network of people needed to protect a continental-sized network of connected eastern wild lands,” he said in a news release.

He next plans to go to Washington, D.C., to discuss his journey with the directors of the Wildlands Network, which sponsored TrekEast. After that, he will return to his home near Westport in the Adirondacks.

“I’d be delighted to work at the Adirondack Council again someday, but there are no openings right now,” he said.

Meantime, he is planning his next big adventure: TrekWest in the Rocky Mountains.

Cougar advocate to give talk

An advocate of reintroducing the cougar to the Adirondacks will speak at the Whallonsburg Grange at 7 p.m. Thursday.

Photo by Larry Master.

Christopher Spatz, president of the Cougar Rewilding Foundation, has argued in the pages of the Explorer and elsewhere that reintroducing the cats would restore the Adirondack Park’s ecological balance.

Spatz will discuss cougar biology and behavior, recent studies of cougar populations, and the much-publicized case of the cougar that migrated from South Dakota to Connecticut.

The talk is sponsored by the Northeast Wilderness Trust and the Champlain Valley Conservation Partnership. For more information, call 802-453-7880 or e-mail Rose Graves at rose@newildernesstrust.org.

Scientists pin down cause of bat disease

Researchers analyze the air near a hibernating bat in the Adirondacks. Photo by Carl Heilman II.

A study published in the journal Nature confirms that the disease decimating bat colonies in New York and many other states is caused by a fungus known as Geomyces destructans.

Known as white-nose syndrome, the disease causes lesions on the bats’ skin and a white growth on their muzzles. Since its discovery in a cave near Albany in 2006, it has spread to sixteen states and four Canadian provinces.

The disease has so devastated bat populations that some species are in danger of extinction.

Earlier this year, Winnie Yu reported in the Explorer that the number of little brown bats in the Adirondacks—once the most common bat in the region—has plummeted 90 percent. Northern bats are down 98 percent. Indiana bats, an endangered species, are down 60 percent.

Biologist Jeremy Coleman of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, one of the five authors of the study, said today that the disease is continuing to spread, though there is some evidence that it has stabilized in some colonies.

Scientists had suspected that Geomyces destructans was the cause of white-nose syndrome, but the new study confirms it. Researchers at the National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin found that healthy bats exposed to the fungus developed lesions and other symptoms associated with the disease. Before the study, some experts speculated that the fungus was itself a symptom, not a cause, of illness.

The researchers say little can be done to control the spread of white-nose syndrome. One possibility is manipulating the habitats of caves to make them less hospitable to the fungus.

The same fungus exists in Europe, but it has not decimated bat populations there. It’s thought that the fungus may have been inadvertently carried to the United States by a human and introduced to a commercial cave in Schoharie County, whence it spread to bat hibernacula.

Coleman’s co-authors included three scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey: microbiologist David Blehert, wildlife pathologist Carol Meteyer, and wildlife disease specialist Anne Ballmann. The fifth researcher was Justin Boyles of the University of Tennessee.

For more information about white-nose syndrome and its impact on the Adirondacks, we encourage you to read Winnie’s story.

Wild cougar passed through Adirondacks

The wild cougar that journeyed some 1,800 miles from South Dakota to Connecticut passed through the Adirondacks in 2010, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

The cougar's track in Lake George. Photo from DEC.

Cindy Eggleston spotted a cougar in her backyard in the town of Lake George on December 16. The next day, her husband, David Eggleston, who is a retired DEC colonel, and Environmental Conservation Officer Louis Gerrain followed the animal’s tracks and collected hair samples from what appeared to be a bedding site.

DNA analysis of the hairs indicated that they came from the same cougar that was killed by a car on a highway in Milford, Connecticut, on June 11. Previously, DNA tests of the Connecticut cougar showed that it was the same cougar that had been tracked in Minnesota and Wisconsin and that it came from a breeding population in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The cougar was first detected in Minnesota in December 2009 and then tracked as it wandered through Wisconsin. In May 2010, a cougar was caught on trail cameras near the border of Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Scientists believe it was the same cougar. Presumably, it traveled through the Upper Peninsula into Ontario and then headed south, eventually passing through the Adirondacks.

The cat was a healthy male, weighing about 140 pounds that apparently had been in search of a mate.

DEC biologist Kevin Hynes said young males out west usually travel only one or two hundred miles in search of a mate, though one cougar outfitted with a radio collar trekked 660 miles from South Dakota to Oklahoma. The cougar killed in Connecticut traveled about three times as far.

“Sometimes wildlife do unexpected things,” Hynes said. “This was a remarkable journey. If you had asked me before it happened, I wouldn’t have thought that it was possible.”

DEC says cougars were extirpated from the Adirondacks in the 1800s, though some people contend that a remnant population continues to dwell in the region. Hynes argues that the fact that the animal was observed and tracked–not only in New York but in other states–is evidence against the existence of a remnant population.

“If we had a number of mountain lions living in the Adirondacks or the Catskills, they certainly would be detected over time,” he said.

Hynes added that Eggleston’s may be the first sighting of a wild cougar in New York State since the late 1800s. A cougar kitten was shot and killed in Saratoga County in 1993, but tests indicated that it had been a captive animal of South American origin.

Cougar migrated from South Dakota

The mountain lion was killed by a car in Connecticut. Photo courtesy of Connecticut DEEP.

You may have read about the cougar that was killed when struck by a car in Milford, Connecticut, in June. There was a lot of speculation about where it came from. Was it a wild cougar? Was it an escaped or released pet?

The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection announced today that a genetic analysis revealed that the cat likely came from a wild population in South Dakota. DNA samples also revealed that it was the same animal whose movements were tracked in Minnesota and Wisconsin in 2009 and 2010.

Several years ago, in The Beast in the Garden, David Baron wrote that western mountain lions were becoming more adapted to human landscapes and had begun to migrate eastward. He predicted that it would be only a matter of time before the big cats arrived here in the East. And now we know that one, at least, made it this far.

“This is the first evidence of a mountain making its way to Connecticut from western state,” said Daniel Esty, the commissioner of Connecticut agency, “and there is still no evidence indicating that there is a native population of mountain lions in Connecticut.”

Lori Severino, a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, said it’s possible that the cougar passed through New York, but the department had no confirmed sightings of the cat. She added that this is the first time the department has seen proof that a cougar has migrated this far east.

Cougars once lived in the Adirondacks, but state wildlife biologists say they have been extirpated since the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, cougar sightings are reported fairly frequently. Generally,  state biologists write them off as cases of mistaken identity. Any cougar that is sighted for real is thought to be a former pet.

In the July/August issue of the Adirondack Explorer, wildlife biologist Rainer Brocke argues in a Viewpoint that the Adirondacks does not have enough wilderness to support a population of cougars. Look for a rebuttal in the September/October issue, written by John Laundre, a biologist who says recent research indicates that cougars can live in proximity to humans.

That a cougar migrated 1,500 miles from South Dakota to Connecticut is a point in Laundre’s favor. On the other hand, as Brocke would note, it did get hit by a car.

Click here to read the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection news release.

Most Poke-O climbing routes to reopen

Every spring, the state Department of Environmental Conservation closes routes on popular rock-climbing cliffs where peregrine falcons are known to nest. Once it’s determined exactly where the falcons are nesting, some routes are reopened. Recently, DEC biologist Joe Racette said it has been confirmed that falcons are nesting on the Nose on Poke-o-Moonshine Mountain. As a result, fifty-four climbing routes in the vicinity will remain closed. But more than two hundred other routes on Poke-O will be open to climbers starting tomorrow (Thursday, April 28).

Mark Meschinelli climbs Catharsis on Poke-o-Moonshine. Photo by Phil Brown.

Racette said all routes on Moss Cliff in Wilmington Notch and the Upper and Lower Washbowl Cliffs near Chapel Pond will remain closed until further notice.

Click here to read a story that appeared in the Explorer about climbing Catharsis, a popular route on Poke-O Slab.

Following is a list of the closed routes on Poke-O. The numbers are the numbers of the routes found in the guidebook Adirondack Rock.

26  Garter

27  Varsity

28  Junior Varsity

29  The Snake

30  Roof of All Evil

31  Slime Line

32 Firing Line

33 Psychosis

34 Microwave

35 Creaking Wall

36  Blinded by Rainbows

37  Forget Bullet

38 Rattlesnake

39 Freedom Flight

40 Project

41  Remembering Youth

42 Sound System

43 Pillar

44 Autumn Flare

45 Katrina

46 Deuteronomy

47 Superstition Traverse

48 Spooks

49 The Howling

50 Salad Days

51 Climb Control To Major Bob

52 Pentecostal

53 Project

54 Verdon

55 Homecoming

56 Ukiah

57 Raindance

58 Libido

59 Snake Slide

60  Scorpion

63 Summer Break

64 Wild Blue

65 God’s Grace

66 Home Run Derby

67 Karmic Kickback

68 The FM

69 Nose Traverse

70 Sky Traverse

71 Silver Streak

72 Spectacular Rising Traverse

73 The Body Snatcher

75 The Snatch

76 Knights in Armor

77 Great Dihedral

78 Half Mile

79 Sea of Seams

80 C-Tips

81 Project

82 Mogster