Photo credit: Juliet Craig
Awarded to Okanagan Nation Alliance to restore and secure anthropogenic roosting habitat for bats by locating, creating, and monitoring bat roosts, and communicating with landowners.
PROPONENT: Okanagan Nation Alliance and Kootenay Community Bat Project
DESCRIPTION: The bat community in the West Kootenay is one of the most diverse in Canada, with 12 species representing significant differences in their foraging and roosting requirements. The two building-roosting species most commonly found in buildings in the West Kootenay (Little Brown Myotis, listed as endangered federally and Yuma Myotis, vulnerable in BC) are now experiencing significant mortalities in NW Washington due to white nose syndrome (WNS), the fungal disease which is slowly spreading towards the BC border from Washington, Montana, and Saskatchewan. This project will build a bat condo at Elk Root Conservation Farm Society (ERC) in Vallican to provide habitat replacement to a nearby recently excluded local bat colony. This new condo will complement a growing network of condos already built or under construction in the greater Creston area, the Kootenay Lake region, and now Slocan Valley.
Our long-term goal is to restore and secure anthropogenic roosting habitat for bats. In the West Kootenay, including the RDCK area, our project entails locating, creating, and monitoring roosts, and communicating with landowners.
OBJECTIVE: The project objectives are to:
- Create habitat for building-roosting bats (condo) and monitor the use of the condo through exit counts, acoustic monitoring, guano sampling, and wildlife cameras.
- Monitor the new Bat Condo in Crawford Bay and Kuskanook.
- Secure and protect bat habitat by supporting and educating RDCK area landowners who have bats and provide guidance for roost protection, enhancement, or replacement.
- Promote the annual BC Bat Count Initiative.
- Expand the interactive map of all known roosts in the RDCK. adding Electoral Area H (Slocan Valley).
