As the sun was setting on Saturday, May 16th, the Wildlife Explorers and their families donned headlamps or flashlights and walked the short distance from the BiodiversityWorks office to Cranberry Acres, where they found Liz and Silas set up for the 4-H club’s Nocturnal Wildlife Meeting. The goal of this meeting is to show club members some of the local wildlife that is active at night. They listened to the calls of spring peepers and American woodcock and got an up-close look at invertebrates drawn into a black-lit tarp. But the main event of the meeting was mist-netting for bats.
The Wildlife Explorers investigated invertebrates drawn in to a black-lit tarp as part of the Nocturnal Wildlife Meeting in May.
American woodcock are not often seen, but their distinctive "peent" calls are a familiar component of Martha's Vineyard twilight soundscapes in the early spring. The Wildlife Explorers talked about these and other nocturnal species during the Nocturnal Wildlife Night in May.
At 8 p.m., just after sunset, the Wildlife Explorers assisted Liz and Silas in unfurling three 12-foot long mist nets stacked one on top of the other in a formation bat biologists refer to as a “triple high.” After opening nets, the club members retreated 100 meters or so , learning quick, fun facts about bat biology during a five-minute count down until it was time to check the nets. As dusk descended over the Wildlife Explorers, the anticipation for each successive net run grew. While describing bat’s use of echolocation or their unique skeletal structure, Silas and Liz would be cut off regularly by someone pointing out a bat flying overhead in the direction of the nets.
A triple-high mist-net configuration use to capture bats.
On the fourth net run of the evening, the anticipation was paid off.
“It’s a bat! It’s a bat!” all the club members shouted, pointing to the top-most rung of the triple high, where a small black ball of fur wriggled in the net.
“A silver-haired bat!” Liz confirmed once the net had been lowered. Club members (and their parents) had front row seats while Liz processed the bat, sexing it, weighing it or measuring its arm length while fielding questions from the club members that alternated between biology/life history-related (How many pups do they have? Is she an adult? Could she be pregnant?) and complete wildcard questions (Can we name her Duchess von Straud? Can we feed her a bug from the tarp?). The club members got involved with the processing by helping fill out the data sheet and offering observations, and once everything had been recorded, they waved the Duchess goodbye, cheering as she flew overhead into a cloud of yummy mosquitos.
Liz processes the bat we captured while fielding questions from the Wildlife Explorers.
The silver-haired bat captured during the Nocturnal Wildlife Meeting on May 16.
The Nocturnal Wildlife Meeting was the finale of the Wildlife Explorers 4-H season and marked the end of the club’s second year. The following evening, members from all the island’s 4-H clubs convened for 4-H Family Night, a big potluck where each club shared what they did that year. The Wildlife Explorers presented this powerpoint showcasing highlights from our four meetings. The goal of the club is to introduce local youth interested in animals to the field of wildlife biology and some of the techniques commonly used to study the natural world, and it was during this presentation that it became clear how much the club members had learned. They explained how we decided where to set camera traps, how to tell the sex of a painted turtle, and why mist nets are an effective tool to catch bats. This was a great conclusion to the 4-H season! I really enjoyed getting to know the club members this year. But my favorite moment of the whole 4-H season came just after the presentation had concluded, when Lucy Grinnan, the director of Martha’s Vineyard 4-H, asked the The Wildlife Explorers the same question asked to every group at the conclusion of their presentation.
“What was your favorite thing you did as part of this club?”
“Everything!” the club members answered in unison.
