Who knew? Bats are apparently all the rage these days. In just the past week, I’ve read a couple of articles about bats — one about where to watch them and the second about efforts to protect them from wind turbines.
The bats that live under the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin have received plenty of publicity over the years, but each night at Caprock Canyons State Park’s Clarity Tunnel, park visitors can watch tens of thousands of bats take to the skies on summer nights after dusk.
It is estimated that up to half a million Mexican Free Tail bats live in the tunnel.
Perhaps not in the park, but certainly in the Panhandle, among the dangers the bats must avoid are wind turbines — and specifically their spinning blades. They may not look like they’re moving very fast, but in reality the tips of the blades typically exceed 100 miles per hour.
Protecting bats, and birds, is important because we have a lot of wind turbines in Texas. In fact, our state is the nation’s leading producer of wind energy.
And my beloved Texas Christian University is leading the way. Biologist Amanda Hale said the combination of the fast-moving blades and the fact that bats use echo-locating — rather than eyesight — when they fly, is deadly. One moment the blade isn’t there — giving the bat’s navigation system the go ahead to keep flying straight. In the blink of an eye, the blade is right where it wasn’t an instant ago.
Not only that, Hale told KERA, bats appear to be attracted to the large, white turbines, and one of the questions she and her team are attempting to answer is, “why?”
According to an article on KERAnews.org, Hale and her students capture bats around TCU’s campus and the adjoining neighborhoods and keep them in a mesh enclosed area in a specially modified barn to be studied for about a week.
They use high speed cameras to track how they interact with different types of surfaces.
The article states, “The evidence is accumulating that how they’re approaching these smooth surfaces is not different than how they’re approaching water,” Hale says. “And they’re coming across and then it’s not water and sometimes they seem to get a little confused and do sort of a belly bounce on the surface, but they’re certainly touching the surface with their face.”
So Hale and her team are studying different types of surfaces that can be used on the turbines that will help keep the bats away.
“They key is to find the right texture so that bats don’t confuse the surface for tree bark, and to make sure the treatment is durable but not overly expensive,” the article states.
Bats feast on pests like mosquitoes, scorpions, centipedes and the moths of the cotton bollworm and corn earworm, both of which can cause major damage to crops, so they’re good to have around. And once the utility companies finally get the lines built to move the electricity they produce, wind turbines will be pretty good for the environment.
And as you’ve read in this newspaper, there will be more of them not only here, but around the state.
Next summer Hale and her team will test different coatings on turbines in a wind farm near Oklahoma.
In the mean time, head up to Caprock Canyons State Park, the Congress Avenue bridge or any of the countless other caves and crevices that bats call home and watch them take off for their evening meal. If Hale and her team are successful, there might be even more of the little, furry, winged mammals to see in the future.
Bill Crist is the publisher of the Snyder Daily News. Comments about his column may be emailed to publisher@snyderdailynews.com.