Endangered Bat Stalls Road Project

PORT MATILDA, Pa. — Dusk gives way to darkness on Bald Eagle Mountain as a bat scientist and her assistant rig flimsy poles with rope and string up two wispy nets.

Switching off their headlamps, they begin another night’s stakeout for the elusive, endangered Indiana bat. A search like theirs, they realize, can have serious implications: The controversial critter has become a scourge to loggers and builders--and a savior to environmental groups fighting to protect hardwood forests. This central Pennsylvania woodland is one of the battlegrounds.

It’s not long before something flits overhead.

“Let me get the bat detector,” says Amy Henry, a 29-year-old scientist whose consulting firm was hired to make sure no Indiana bats are in the way of a $500-million interstate highway under construction here.

She clicks on the hand-held radio. Static. Then, faintly, confirmation: thwick-thwick-thwick-thwick-thwick!

“That’s a bat,” she says in a scientist’s monotone as the silhouette zips down the narrow lane cut through the forest, toward Henry’s 20-foot-high mist net. She follows, and as she gets to the net, her headlamp flashes on something struggling.

It could be a big brown bat, or even a flying squirrel. Gingerly untangling it, she examines it under a flashlight. Another false alarm: This one is a northern long-eared bat, one of the Indiana bat’s cousins. At the end of the four weeks, Henry’s group turned up no Indiana bats.

But their search along the future Interstate 99 corridor is a lesson in Indiana bat politics: All it takes is a solitary Indiana bat--and sometimes none at all--to slow a project.

The 200 bats that winter in a cave 20 miles away caused many headaches: They led to lengthy negotiations between the state Department of Transportation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And they cost a chunk of taxpayer money. Cincinnati-based BHE Environmental Inc., Henry’s employer, was paid $180,000 for the search last month.

If one were found, PennDOT would have had to limit logging for the new highway, possibly disrupting the construction timetable.

Even now, PennDOT’s bat woes are by no means over. The project is only clear for two years.

Elsewhere, work has been stopped in places where only a single specimen has been found. Projects have stalled in forests where no bats have been spotted, ever. They can be stalled even though scientists have a hard time pinning down where the critter roams to eat and roost.

“When you’re dealing with an endangered species, it’s basically a presence-absence question,” said Robert Currie of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “If it’s there, you have to deal with it.”

Scientists believe that the bats’ numbers are declining because of damage to their summer habitat in forests from Missouri to New Hampshire. On that premise, activists--citing the Endangered Species Act--are increasingly taking state governments, federal agencies and private industry to court.

The logic of endangered species laws forces agencies to err on the side of caution.

Two trapped Indiana bats prompted Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest and Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest to restrict timbering temporarily. The U.S. Forest Service is drawing up revised plans for managing the bat in several national forests. It may limit how many and what kind of trees are logged in the future.

“It’s better to assume it is there and manage the forest accordingly than to try to determine that it’s not there,” said Mark Bosch, coordinator of the forest service’s endangered species programs. “Even if you do prove that it’s not there today, what do you do the next day when one decides to fly into the forest?”

The Indiana Bat Recovery Team, a group of government officials, scientists, environmentalists and logging industry representatives, is revising its management guidelines. The concept is to manage as if the bat is there, whether or not one has been seen, but a first draft has sparked controversy.

Fueling the debate are environmental groups, including Heartwood, a regional network; the Allegheny Defense Project in Pennsylvania; and the Conservation Action Project in New Hampshire.

“When agencies are unwilling to take the initiative to protect their habitat, that’s when we step in in court,” said Heartwood’s Devin Scherubel. “The scientific literature is clear enough and strong enough [that] the courts are willing to side with the activists over the word of public agencies.”

But considering all the trouble the bat is creating, the scientists are not always so sure where the bats are.

Trapping is the most common way of finding them, but even some bat specialists admit that it hardly offers conclusive answers.

Weeks of netting in the forest sometimes yields only a few trapped bats, or none at all, as in Pennsylvania.

The reason? Bats in general are elusive fliers that are hard to capture as they roam the countryside searching for insects during the summer months. They fly high up in the forest canopy, above the highest nets. Scientists try to cut them off as they migrate between feeding stops along river corridors and narrow forest trails.

A new technology called anabat can detect the bats’ distinctive ultrasound call, but it requires recordings of the calls of various species. In the Allegheny National Forest, anabat detected two Indiana bats, allowing the searchers to concentrate on certain locations and, in the end, snare one.

“You have to realize Indiana bats are incredibly difficult to catch. If you caught one bat, you’re pretty sure that there are others,” Scherubel said.

The Indiana bats’ numbers have declined to 350,000 from 800,000 four decades ago. Nine out of 10 winter in a handful of caves in Indiana, Kentucky and Missouri.

Other endangered bats have recovered when their caves were gated to keep out hikers, spelunkers, vandals and the curious. For some reason, the Indiana bat has not responded. Researchers speculate that it might be less adaptable to ever-encroaching development.

The bat troubles on I-99 prompted one frustrated PennDOT planner to hang a photo of the critter--Myotis sodalis to scientists--in the office.

The caption: “Myprojectum stopicus.”