Farm landscapes evoke images of barn swallows feasting on countless insects, bumble bees visiting blueberry flowers, and barn owls silently hunting for voles. The Delta Farmland and Wildlife Trust promotes stewardship practices on local farms to support these species at risk. We pair wildlife monitoring with our implementation of programs such as establishing grassland set-aside fields or hedgerows.
In the June Nature Notes column, I talked about how we were excited to be starting a bat-monitoring program across farmland in Delta. The goal of the project for this first year was to assess if our stewardship programs are providing useful habitats for bats and to determine which species are present in our area.
Our research consisted of two parts. During the most active season for bats (June 1 – July 15), we deployed ultrasonic recorders in grassland set-asides and hedgerows to see which bats were visiting for foraging or roosting. Towards the end of the active season in July, we also set up a bat recorder on top of a car and drove throughout Ladner, Tsawwassen, and surrounding farmland to see if or where there were bat hot spots in our area.
We detected six species of bats across all sites and survey methods.
The four most commonly detected species were little brown myotis, hoary bat, silver-haired bat, and Yuma myotis. Little brown myotis was observed at all 14 monitoring sites of grassland set-asides and hedgerows, and the other species were observed at the majority of the sites.
These four most commonly detected species are all considered species of conservation concern because of population declines caused by disease, depredation, and habitat loss. It is encouraging to see farmland support so many important species of bats and we aim to expand our research and monitoring of bats in future years.
Editor’s note: Nature Notes is a monthly column produced by the Delta Naturalists and their community partners. For info on monthly meetings and more see www.dncb.wordpress.com and www.facebook.com/DeltaNats/.
