News from Cherokee Beach, our future conservation easement in Tangipahoa Parish!
When we held For the Love of Land at this site back in February, we shared how the property owner hopes to turn Cherokee Beach into an ecological research forest, so that students from area universities will have a place to go collect data. This month, that dream started to come true!
A group of Southeastern grad students, techs from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and folks from Bat Conservation International spent the evening setting up mist nets in order to capture, sample, inventory, and then release bats. Their nets were so light and fine, the camera barely picks them up… a good tool for capturing bats!
Nets were erected at two locations on land, and one stretching across the Tangipahoa River under the bridge. Every 20 minutes the researchers checked each net for bats… but all they found were a lot of stuck beetles. The bats were evasive that evening.
That’s the way research goes. While Louisiana is home to plenty of bats, they are dispersed and very hard to capture, owing to the abundance of food and water sources. We learned that bats in drier states are easier to inventory, since they will congregate around the single water source.
The Land Trust wishes these folks GOOD LUCK as they continue to sample grids across the state. Thank you for coming out to Cherokee Beach for data collection!
