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RIPLEY -- "Lucy!" cried one bat researcher to Jonathan Townsend. Lucy is the affectionate nickname for the Little Brown Bat, also known as Myotis lucifugus. "It's too hard to shout Myotis lucifugus during research" claimed Townsend, "so we all shout Lucy! when we find a Little Brown Bat."
That's been harder to do in recent years. Historically, Chautauqua County had some of the best Little Brown Bat habitat in Western New York. The Chautauqua Institution had a Little Brown Bat maternity colony estimated to have 10,000 bats. Another famous maternity colony was in Ripley, where an estimated 1,700 Little Brown Bats lived in bat houses on a historic barn. Chautauqua Bird, Tree and Garden Club member Caroline Bissell dedicated a lot of time and energy to documenting the bats in Ripley and at Chautauqua, educating the community about their importance through her famous "Bat Chats" and other community events.
One of the biggest threats to bats before 2006 was people killing them, but a new threat emerged that wiped out 90 - 99% of Little Brown Bats and a number of related bat species. The loss was so catastrophic that it was hard to catalog. The new threat was a cold-loving fungus in the caves where these bats hibernate. This fungal infection quickly became known as White Nose Syndrome, for the characteristic white fungus seen on the nose of hibernating bats. White Nose Syndrome only affected bats that hibernated in caves, like "Lucy". It caused many to fly out too early or caused infections that ate away parts of wings. Dead bats piled up inside and outside of the caves. It was utterly devastating.
Little Brown Bats virtually disappeared from the landscape within a couple of years. Dr. Merlin Tuttle, sometimes called the Indiana Jones of Bat Conservation, is an internationally renowned bat conservationist from Texas who came to the area in 2016. He was immediately interested in the Ripley Bat Barn, which he had already heard of. The colony of 1,700 Little Brown Bats was reduced to less than 40. That's the bad news.
The good news is that Tuttle inspired local bat biologist Jonathon Townsend, fondly known as bat boy to his family, to count at the site in the same way that Caroline Bissell had a decade or more earlier. Over the last decade, he has watched the bat numbers slowly and steadily climb to over 500 bats today. Little Brown Bats only have one pup a year, very rarely two, according to the Institute for Environmental Research and Education, so recovery was always expected to be slow.
The big problem now is that the site, which has been in the same family since 1847, is at risk. The owners, who have worked so hard to preserve and expand their bat colony, must move and need to sell this amazing piece of bat habitat.
Buffalo Bat Habitat, a non-profit that has been working hard to educate people about bats while creating more habitat and homes for them, has launched a campaign to purchase the land. They have applied for close to $400,000 in grants, secured local government support and launched a campaign to conserve this ideal bat habitat on the shores of Lake Erie.
They understand that not everyone loves bats, but bats provide a lot of economic services. One bat can eat thousands of mosquitoes each year, and are estimated to contribute $10 million to $15 million to the agricultural industry in Chautauqua County each year and over 1 billion dollars nationally, mostly through eating huge numbers of crop pests, according to Science.org.
Plans for the Ripley site go far beyond the bats. Plans include a Veteran's Memorial Garden, preservation of a significant Native American site, publicly accessible trails, a bat education center, and, of course, working to enhance the habitat to help the bat population keep growing.
Learn more about the efforts to preserve this site, or donate to support the cause, at www.buffalobathabitat.org.