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New Outside Science (inside parks): Bat Week!

Jessica Rosado helps set up a mist net to capture bats at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
Jessica Rosado helps set up a mist net to capture bats at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

NPS photo / Bend

It’s Bat Week—the perfect time to visit the bats at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area for the newest episode of Outside Science (inside parks).

In this special Bat Week-edition, we’ll spend time with interns, volunteers, and staff at Glen Canyon to see how and why they study the bats there.

Jessica Rosado is a Student Conservation Association (SCA) intern at the park. She spends her time there capturing, measuring, and evaluating multiple species of bats in the park.

I really wanted to study bats because they always seemed like they were misunderstood,” Jessica says.

Jessica arrived at Glen Canyon with a natural affinity for bats, but Shandiin Tallman, a biological science technician at the park had to overcome a childhood fear of bats before doing this work. After a summer of untangling tiny bats from the mist nets, Shandiin sees them a little differently.

Brown bat
Brown Bat

NPS Photo / Bend

“They’re just cute puppies with wings,” Shandiin says.

Whether you think bats are handsome or not, we can agree they play an integral role in ecosystems and face some serious threats to their survival. Watch the video to find out more.

The Outside Science (inside parks) series shares stories of critical, creative science. Since January 2016, the Natural Resource Stewardship and Science directorate has partnered with a videography crew from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., to uncover stories of people doing science in our national parks. Part citizen science, part education, these videos have covered topics such as sea turtles and light pollution, toxic algal blooms, and mercury levels in dragonfly larvae. We’ll produce six new webisodes in 2017, and we’ll also rebroadcast some of the favorites from 2016.

Watch this and all the previous episodes on our Facebook page, YouTube playlist, or Explore Nature website.

Last updated: October 26, 2017