CATOCTIN MOUNTAIN PARK - Being a bat-catcher is a messy business.
Your jeans get wet from wading in streams or mud to set up nets. You spend so much time in the woods you can tell the difference between a bat's squeak and a flying squirrel's chirp. On a good night, you spend most of your night pulling squirming, biting animals from the trap. On bad nights, all you do is slap mosquitos and watch the bats flit around the nets.
"We only catch the dumb ones," jokes Rachel Gauza, one of the researchers on the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science team.
But for Gauza and her fellow researchers, the effort is worth it. They are surveying bats in the state as part of an effort by the federal government to count the number of species in the nation's preserves. What they find could help answer fundamental questions about the animals - how far some bats migrate, where they hibernate and how many live in Maryland.
They also hope to find an Indiana bat, an endangered species that hasn't been seen in Maryland since the late 1980s. Scientists say that all the conditions are ripe for the bat's comeback, which could lead to extra funds for the park from the federal government to help protect the animal.
"It would be a huge thing for the park," says James W. Voight, resource manager for the Frederick County park.
On a recent night, there was little time for slapping mosquitos or searching for salamanders, the bat-catchers' other favorite diversion. The group's AnaBat II, a machine that detects bats' high-pitched squeaks, chirps continuously, and the researchers are constantly wading in the stream to pick the bats out of the nets, hung over a mountain stream where insects gather.
In the first hour, the group collected nine animals, not counting one that was snared but managed to claw its way free. Bats occasionally rip apart the nets to escape.
"Some of the big ones, it looks like they're eating the net," says Jennifer Karow, a senior at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, who is working on the project this summer.
The furry mammals hiss and bite when they are pulled from the net.
"If you blow on their faces, sometimes it helps," Karow says before puffing on the bat, which doesn't stop angrily squealing.
Karow measured the animal's wings, slipped it into a plastic bag and weighed it, then held its wings out while Gauza took small skin samples. Researchers say the bats don't feel pain and that the skin grows back in about three weeks.
