Dead Raccoon Found In Henrico Had Rabies / Raccoon Removal & Capture – Richmond, VA

Rabid Animals – Raccoons

Rabid animals can pose a significant health risk to Virginian’s and their pets. In Virginia, the top rabid animals include raccoons, skunks, foxes and bats. If you see what you believe is a rabid animal contact your local animal control immediately, then contact us at (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975. Rabid animals in Virginia are a real threat as the article below shows.

Henrico, VA—A dead raccoon found in Western Henrico tested positive for rabies, Animal Protection officials say.

Officers were called to the 8400 block of Marroit Road on October 13, where they found a raccoon who had been killed by a dog.

The raccoon’s body was submitted to the

rabid animals

Richmond & Charlottesville Raccoon Removal

State Lab for rabies testing, and on Tuesday, the test returned positive results.

The dog which killed the raccoon will be quarantined for 45 days, to ensure it did not contract rabies from the raccoon.

Henrico Police Animal Protection would like to remind everyone to be sure to keep their pets’ rabies vaccinations current to ensure the safety of their pets and our community. Please contact Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services, LLC at (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975 or visit us on the web at www.virginiaprofessionalwildliferemovalservices.com

We provide animal removal, animal trapping, animal capture and animal control services in the Richmond and Charlottesville areas for raccoons, squirrels, skunks, snakes, birds, bats, opossums, groundhogs and other wildlife pests.

How Do You Prevent Animal Wildlife Pests From Entering Your Home Or Business?

How do I keep animal wildlife pests from entering my home or business?

Simple, Call Richmond and Charlottesville, VA Animal Removal and Wildlife Control at (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975

prevent animal wildlife pestsWe are often asked by our customers, “How do I keep animals from entering and causing damage to my home?” Many times animal pests enter Richmond, Virginia homes and businesses through weakened or damaged areas. These areas are often the result of storm damage, poor workmanship during construction or remodeling, or simple homeowner neglect of routine home maintenance.

To minimize the possibility of animals entering your Richmond or Charlottesville, VA home and causing further damage to your home’s attic, walls, roof, insulation, wiring, fascia, crawlspace, vents and soffit we recommend that homeowner’s perform an inspection of their home or business twice a year, once just before Spring when newborn animals are typically born, and once in the Fall when animals are looking for Winter denning sites.

By simply taking a pen and paper — or even better, a digital camera — Richmond and Charlottesville, VA home owner’s should examine the entire house and look for signs of loose or missing siding, peeling paint and damaged wood, loose fitting soffits and fascia, cracks in masonry, crawlspace access doors that are missing or will not close properly, and any other problems that animals can exploit to gain entry to your Richmond or Charlottesville Virginia home and cause additional damage. Also look for places where critters such as rats or mice could burrow under the siding or gnaw at the siding or foundation coating. Loose siding needs to be reattached before it rips free and pulls other pieces with it. Wood and masonry siding can be easily reattached and nailed in place; vinyl needs a special siding tool that pulls the lip on one panel over the piece below it to lock the pieces together. Rotting or damaged wood should be replaced. Peeling paint needs to be scraped off before you repaint. Because of the danger of falling, homeowners should stay off the roof and leave that type of work to the professionals. Roof work is too dangerous for novices to walk around up there. Instead, you should examine the roof from the ground using binoculars to look for missing, curling or damaged shingles. Also look for mold or fungus growing on shingles, which discolors them and lessens the life expectancy of the roof. Mold or fungus can be washed off, but, again, this is a job best left to professions.

If an animal damages or enters your Richmond or Charlottesville, Virginia home or business you should contact a professional animal wildlife removal company. Our Richmond and Charlottesville, VA Animal Removal and Wildlife Control Experts provide full-service nuisance animal control services throughout the Richmond and Charlottesville Virginia area. Wildlife Control operators can get rid of all types of nuisance wild animal including the removal and control of such animals as Birds, Bats, Bees, Squirrels, Groundhogs, Snakes, Mice, Skunks, Raccoons, Possums, and Rats. Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services, LLC is Virginia’s nuisance animal removal specialist. To schedule one of our Richmond or Charlottesville animal control technicians to inspect and remove wildlife pests from your home or business, call us at (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975 or visit us on the web at www.virginiaprofessionalwildliferemovalservices.com

How To Get Bats Out Of A Richmond, VA House Or Attic

How Do I Get Bats Out of My Richmond, VA House or Attic?

how to get bats out of a richmond, va house

Bats in the attic? Call (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975. Now is a good time to implement a non-lethal approach for removing bats in Richmond from living spaces, as follows:

Locate the access points that the bats are using to gain entry Install bat removal devices and equipment to remove the bats Seal the entry points (ONLY AFTER YOU ARE SURE THAT ALL BATS HAVE BEEN REMOVED). Clean-up the bat guano (Droppings) Provide an alternate home for the bats.

Protect the Baby Bats

In general, Richmond bat removal and exclusions should not be conducted from May through August. Exclusions occurring during this time period may separate mothers from their young, leaving the pups (baby bats) to die of starvation. Frantic mothers, searching for an opening to reach their pups, may enter adjacent living spaces and be more difficult to deal with than what you started with. Also, by trapping the flightless young inside, you risk creating another problem involving the smell of dead animals.

Richmond, VA Bat Removal and Exclusion

STEP 1 – REMOVE THE BATS: First, locate the entry points. At sunset or just before sunrise observe where the bats are exiting or entering the building. Pay special attention to areas in which bats commonly find access: corners, eaves, louvers, loose siding, window air conditioners, and loose or damaged screens. Visible signs such as staining and guano (bat droppings) will also help identify openings. After all openings have been discovered, install bat removal devices and equipment.

STEP 2 – SEAL THE BAT ENTRY POINTS: Bats may still find their way into attics or similar roosting space until you repair and / or seal up all access points. Note that bats are not rodents and therefore will not chew their way into a structure if you close off the opening. They use only existing openings.

STEP 3 – BAT GUANO (DROPPINGS) CLEAN-UP: After the bats in Richmond, VA homes and businesses have been successfully removed and excluded, the bat guano needs to be removed from your Richmond, VA home or business. You may wish to engage a professional trained in this type of clean up. Bat guano contains a fungus that causes a respiratory disease known as histoplasmosis (caused by a fungus that can grow on accumulations of bird and bat guano).

STEP 4 – INSTALL BAT HOUSES: During a successful Richmond, VA bat removal and exclusion, the bats will have a good chance of staying nearby Richmond. Why should you care if they stay? A single bat in Richmond can eat 1,000 or more mosquito-sized insects in one hour and the equivalent of the bat’s own body weight per night. And that is just a single bat, you can imagine what a colony of 20 to 100 bats can eat in one night. Bats will NOT attack you while you are enjoying an evening on your porch. Instead, they are enjoyable to view as they capture thousands of insect pests that would normally be interrupting your relaxing night outside your Richmond, VA home or business. You can enjoy the benefits by providing bats with an alternative place to live.

We hope that this information has helped you to understand how to get bats out of a Richmond, VA house.

Choose the best local and professional bat removal and control company in Richmond, VA. Contact Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services, LLC at (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975. Visit us on the web at VirginiaProfessionalWildlifeRemovalServices.com

Little Brown Bat Removal and Control, Little Brown Bat Information

Little Brown Bat Removal & Control – Richmond and Charlottesville Virginia

little brown bat removal and controlBats in your attic? Bats in vents? Bat in the house? Call our BAT REMOVAL EXPERTS at (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975. Little Brown bat removal and control is a specialized service that should only be performed by a professional bat control expert in Virginia that has specific knowledge of the Little Brown bat and Big Brown bat. If you’ve had a bat or two appear in your house, or if you’re hearing noises you suspect are made by bats, a little bit of investigation will go a long way. Depending on the time of year, it may be an isolated incident, or evidence of a resident maternity colony; here’s how to tell the difference, and how to proceed in either case.

Little Brown bats are sometimes mistaken for late-flying butterflies when they leave their roosts before sundown, due to their very small size and erratic flight patterns. Little Brown bats require a nearby, ready source of water, such as a lake, stream, or even a swimming pool.

Little Brown bats do form maternity colonies, but pregnant solitary females have also been found. Little Brown bats generally have one pup (offspring) per year. Little Brown bats can often be found roosting in attics during the day. Little Brown bats do not seem to migrate far and may stay in the same area year round. They probably hibernate in mines and caves during winter. They are also known to roost in buildings or attics if conditions are suitable.

Hearing Noises? Identifying the Culprit as Little Brown Bats
First of all, is essential to verify that a nuisance is caused by bats, and not some other animal. Scrambling, scratching, and thumping sounds coming from attics and walls may be caused by rats, mice, or flying squirrels. Twittering and rustling sounds in old chimneys, often attributed to bats, may be caused by chimney swifts. Bats often become noisy before leaving their roosts at sunset and may chatter on hot days when they move down attic walls to seek refuge from heat. Thus, an increase in chirping noises about dusk probably indicates bats.

Here’s when you pull out the lawn chairs, lemonade, and bug repellent, and sit outside to watch your house around sunset time. If the “bats” swarm and enter the chimney at dusk, most likely these are swifts; a chimney cap will go a long way towards dealing with that problem. Bats will be seen leaving 15-45 minutes after sunset in midsummer. Make note of all the exits the bats are using, and make an approximate count of about how many bats you have (this is important for setting up bat boxes later on). During daylight hours, look for dark staining or smudges along the roofline; these may be places where bats are entering the building, where the oils in the bats’ fur has rubbed off.

Little Brown Bats in Early Fall
The discovery of one or two bats in a house is probably the most frequent problem. Little Brown bats may enter homes through open windows and doors, but may use any crevice it can find. This usually occurs in the early fall when bats are checking for potential roost or hibernation sites. Little Brown bats may also appear in midwinter during a warm weather spell.

Little Brown Bat Appearances in Mid to Late Summer
Repeated occurrences of Little Brown bats in your living spaces in mid to late summer suggest that a maternity colony is close by, most likely in the attic. As juvenile bats begin fending for themselves and exploring, one may explore its way into your living room. The presence of any bat in your living spaces is purely accidental; it is often a simple matter to allow it to escape.

Letting Them Out, Little Brown Bat Exclusion
Any bat will usually find its own way out; jut open all windows and doors leading to the outside. Bats usually will not attack a person even if chased. Never swat or throw things at the bat, or run around waving. All this tends to do is confuse the bat and leave you exhausted. Above all else, calmly watch the bat to make sure it leaves. If the bat refuses to leave, it will calm down and land on something. Drapes and hanging clothes seem to be the preferred rest areas. Place a small box or can over the bat, then gently slide thin cardboard under the “trap” to collect your bat, then release it outside. At last resort, local health authorities can be called to collect the bat, though this may result in its demise. If the bat, or any wild animal, has come in contact with pets, children, handicapped individuals, etc. contact your local health department. Health department recommendations vary from state to state.

The Solution, A Little Brown Bat Exclusion
These are animals that can hone in on a single mosquito flying through the air; a ½ inch crack in the side of a house is easy for them to find.

Professional Measures
If you are dealing with bats in your home, there are several ways a professional bat abatement company can help. Look for a company like Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services, LLC (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975 who:
· Has years of experience finding all the tiny entrances bats use to enter and exit a structure, and in sealing up those gaps.
· Can quickly and efficiently clean up accumulated bat guano and urine, which poses a significant health risk if not dealt with properly.

Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services – It’s who we are and what we do

Virginia Wildlife Removal, Animal Trapping & Pest Control

(434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975

virginia wildlife removalVirginia Wildlife Removal Services was started due to the increasing need for nuisance wildlife to be humanely removed from homes, commercial properties and other areas. Our goal has always been to safely remove wild animals and restore your Richmond and Charlottesville Virginia home or business to its normal condition, whenever possible.

Our Professionalism, Education and Integrity sets us apart.

Professionalism:

We arrive on time and are clearly identified by our uniforms and trucks. We provide you with the highest level of customer service every time. We try to clearly explain everything we are going to do before we do it and we are always available to answer questions. If we do not feel we can effectively solve your problem we tell you this BEFORE we start, not after!

Education:

Many animal removal technicians have very little training, experience, or education. Here at Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services we put a high priority on advanced education because we believe it enables us to better understand animal behavior, provide effective solutions to various problems, and maintain lifelong scientific learning in this field. Just because your dad or your dad’s dad were trappers DOES NOT make you an effective nuisance wildlife removal and control technician. We are not just trappers, but problem solvers.

Integrity:

We charge a SET fee for trapping and exclusions, which we quote to you UP FRONT. We do NOT charge per trap or per animal caught! Some unethical companies can charge you per animal, and then proceed to trap and catch the SAME animal numerous times costing you much more than it should.

Our normal procedures include checking the live traps to monitor progress, change trap locations as necessary, and changing bait to keep it fresh. We always maintain constant communication with you about our progress. Our customers are what make us successful. Our goal is 100% satisfaction from our customers — they are, after all why we have a thriving business. We love what we do! We provide bat removal, beaver removal, bee control, bird control, deer management, foxes, flying squirrel removal, groundhog removal, mice control, mole removal, opossum removal, raccoon removal, rat removal, skunk removal, snake removal, squirrel removal, vole removal and more. Call us today at (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975.

Who Do I Call If I Have A Nuisance Wildlife Pest Problem In Charlottesville Or Richmond, Virginia?

If you own a home or business in Charlottesville or Richmond, Virginia, you know that dealing with strange animals is never any fun. And if you don’t have experience in the matter, you need to seek out an expert for help—a company like Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services, LLC.

If you’re having trouble with critters showing up on your Charlottesville or Richmond property, contact Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services fast. We know what to do to rid your home or business of its animal troubles.

As a wildlife control company, we are going to make a point to figure what type of animal we’re dealing with before proceeding with any course of action. For instance, you may have trash scattered around your yard every night, but cannot figure out what’s causing the mess. It could be something as simple as a cat, or, on the other hand, it could be a raccoon. It’s hard to figure out what it is if you aren’t an expert. A professional company like ours will know what to do to determine the type of animal that’s at the root of the problem.

Once our wildlife control experts discover what animal is causing all the issues, then it’s a matter of finding out how the animal is getting onto the property. Many times, animals can dig under fences or get in through the smallest cracks or crevices. Our professionals will know how to narrow down the possibilities as far as entry onto the property. As a result, we will keep this in mind when going through the process of how best to keep animals out.

The hardest part of wildlife control is catching the animal. Some animals are easier to catch than others. There are various methods involved in catching wild animals. The thing that our professionals know is that different animals call for different methods of capture. For instance, if the issue involves a snake, our experts are not going to use the same tactics that we would use to catch a possum; and vice versa. The bottom line is that hiring an experienced company like ours will save you time, money and offer peace of mind.

After the animal is caught, it’s essential that our wildlife control specialists properly seal off the opening where the animal is getting in. This way, you can rest assured that the animal doesn’t get in from that location again. Also, our specialists can help in identifying and preventing animals from entering from new locations.

When dealing with critters, you want to make sure whoever handles the problem offers a guarantee. Nothing’s worse than thinking you have all those pests squared away, only to wake up one morning and see one of those same critters staring you in the face. If you’re dealing with a professional company like Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services, we will offer a guarantee that the nuisance will be gone or we’ll come out again to remedy the problem.

When you know you have a critter roaming through your Charlottesville or Richmond property, you won’t rest until it’s gone. That’s why you want a wildlife control service company like Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services. We use the most humanely efficient methods to rid your home or business of animal pest problems.

Some of the services we offer Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia homes and businesses include bat removal, bat control, beaver removal, beaver trapping, bird removal, bird control, squirrel removal, squirrel trapping, raccoon removal, raccoon trapping, skunk removal, skunk trapping, snake removal, snake trapping, opossum removal, opossum trapping, groundhog removal, groundhog trapping, mole removal, mole control, fox trapping, fox removal, coyote trapping, coyote removal, chipmunk trapping, chipmunk removal, and turtle trapping and turtle removal. Virginia Professional Wildlife Removal Services, LLC is licensed and insured and provides 24/7 service to home owners and businesses. Call (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975 to have us solve your wildlife problem.

The Desperate Battle Against Killer Bat Plague

The Desperate Battle Against Killer Bat Plague

by Brandon Keim, December 8, 2010, 7:00 am

little brown batIt’s a postcard October morning at Kentucky’s Carter Caves state park. Sycamore and hickory have already turned orange, and the sun crests ancient Appalachian slopes against a cloudless sky. With Halloween a few days away, a life-sized Elvis dummy peeks out a visitor center window. Middle schoolers on a field trip are coming down one of the trails, preceded by their laughter.

The idyll is complete but for two details: All but two of the park’s caves are permanently shut to the public, and in the parking lot are six researchers in Tyvek bodysuits and gloves, like extras from Outbreak.

The caves are closed, and bodysuits required, because of White Nose Syndrome, a bat-killing disease more virulent than any other disease in the known history of mammals. As the children walk to their bus, I wonder if they’ll remember this morning as adults, and tell their own kids about a time when bats lived in caves. “What’s wrong with the bats?” a girl asks, her tour guides having kept the day shadow-free. “They’re sick,” I say.

My answer isn’t precisely correct. Had the girl asked Hazel Barton, a Northern Kentucky University microbiologist who’s there to sample bat hair and skin, or Brooke Slack, a state bat biologist, she would have learned that Carter Caves’ bats are being protected. White Nose Syndrome — WNS for short — hasn’t yet reached Kentucky, but its march down the cave-riddled Appalachians passed within 100 miles of where we stand, putting us squarely on the battle’s front lines.

At this point, it’s a losing battle. Bats with noses dusted by the Geomyces destructans fungus that causes WNS were seen for the first time in early 2006, in upstate New York. One year later, biologists realized that WNS could kill bats in large numbers. By 2008, mortality in major New York and Vermont hibernacula, caves where tens and hundreds of thousands of bats had wintered, was more than 90 percent. Biologists wore gas masks against the stench of rotting bodies. Bones cracked like popcorn under their feet.

By the end of last winter, G. destructans was found in 14 states and two Canadian provinces, and at least a million bats were dead. In August, a high-profile Science study gave computationally modeled meaning to all those dead-bat piles. The little brown bat, more common than any other in North America, the furred star of most every attic and open-window encounter, so numerous as to be considered pests, would be extinct in 20 years in the eastern United States. If by some unexpected miracle WNS mortality dropped from over 90 percent to 5 percent, they might make it to the century’s end.

That essential prognosis applies to at least three other cave-dwelling, hibernating bat species, and probably more, though one-by-one tabulations tend to obscure the potential of WNS to annihilate an entire manner of animal being. In sheer magnitude, WNS threatens to dwarf the demise of plains bison or passenger pigeons, the historical benchmarks of American animal collapse. The closest comparison is Chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease now scouring amphibians from much of the planet.

Yet even as the reality of WNS has emerged in the popular press, public and policy reaction has been muted. Awareness and concern exists, but at a fraction of what would likely be displayed if, say, half of America’s waterfowl were about to vanish.

Bat conservationists tend to blame this on bats’ unfair and untrue reputation as rabies-ridden, hair-tangling rodents. A more fundamental problem, however, is that bats are generally absent from everyday awareness. Most specialize in eating insects at night in the air, an ecological niche both staggeringly enormous and out of sight. Their taxonomic order, Chiroptera — more closely related to primates than rodents — contains more mammal species than any order except rodents, yet most people have never seen a bat up close.

Several thousand hibernate in the old saltpeter mine where Hazel Barton and Brooke Slack and their assistants go. At this point in the season, they’ll fly out at night for a last few pre-winter meals. In the daytime they sleep, clinging to walls and cuddling for warmth and companionship.

Barton, a lifelong spelunker with rare expertise in cave microbiology, is interested in fungi that grow naturally on bat skin. By the glow of headlamps the researchers pluck bats from the ceiling with practiced efficiency, swabbing their skin and clipping tufts of hair from which fungal DNA will later be extracted. Slack examines the wings, looking for any signs of the dreaded disease.

This early in the season, it’s extremely unlikely that G. destructans growth would be visible. But it’s always possible that some spore-carrying survivor from one of West Virginia’s WNS-afflicted colonies arrived this season, scars on its wings portending potential doom. The presence of G. destructans was confirmed in West Virginia’s largest hibernacula last winter; it also reached Tennessee, Missouri and Oklahoma. Barton and Slack were sure it would reach Carter Caves, as well. Their fears survived for another season.

Despite the researchers’ care, the bats start to wake, roused by noise and light and even the ambient temperature difference of our bodies. By the time Barton finishes, many are aloft, circling with the speed and agility of swallows. Their cries reverberate down the narrow hall. Others remain hanging, swaying every so slightly, just enough to make it feel like the walls are pulsing. It’s as if the entire cave is alive.

As we hurry out, I ask Barton whether she thinks these bats will stay WNS-free, if they have a chance. Grimacing, she shakes her head.

Treatment Options

Over a few months of taxi and bar conversations about WNS, most people’s instinctive response was to imagine a treatment, a drug of some sort, something that can be sprayed on bats to kill the fungus and control the disease.

It’s a noble response, rooted in an elbow-grease, can-do spirit and the historical success of relatively straightforward conservation measures like habitat protection and captive breeding, plus an abiding American faith in both medication and technology. Indeed, several groups of researchers, including Hazel Barton and her collaborators, are working on anti-WNS treatments. But if finding a compound that killed G. destructans in a petri dish was enough to stop the outbreak, it would already be over.

In laboratory tests, drug store antifungals like Tinactin and Lamisil kill G. destructans just fine. They’re also neurotoxic endocrine disruptors that kill bats, and even at low, sub-lethal doses would tilt the balance towards extinction. It’s not hard to do. Unlike most small animals, bats live for decades and reproduce slowly, perhaps because — until WNS — survival was generally assured upon reaching adulthood. There was little need for replenishment. Healthy populations of little brown bats grow at an infinitesimal annual rate of about .008 percent.

Unless a WNS treatment destroys G. destructans while staying on the safe side of that threshold, it will simply substitute for the disease. And if researchers find a physiologically safe compound, it needs to be ecologically safe as well, leaving unharmed the thousands of other fungal species that are the foundation of cave ecosystems.

It’s not a trivial concern. When Fusarium solani fungus started to eat the 17,000-year-old cave paintings in Lascaux, France, it was easily eradicated with chemicals. Two years later, an even worse fungus sprouted on the pigments, apparently unleashed from environmental insignificance by the treatments. The same could happen to bats.

After all this, should some safe and balanced compound be found, researchers would need to treat every single bat in every last crack and crevice, all winter long, at outbreak sites. It’s conceivable, but would be so logistically challenging and labor-intensive that even successful treatments represent a stopgap measure.

“Is it possible? Theoretically, yes. But the best-case scenario is to slow the spread down, and maybe to protect one very, very special site,” says Pennsylvania Game Commission biologist Greg Turner. “Even though I’m doing these treatment experiments, I don’t put a lot of hope in finding some miracle cure. There’s just too many problems.”

Kentucky is on the front lines of WNS, but Pennsylvania is a central battleground. The disease arrived in 2008, and has since spread through the state’s eastern hibernacula, with death counts ranging from 80 percent to 99.9 percent. Western Pennsylvania held out longer, but I met Turner as he was driving to Laurel Caverns in the state’s far southwestern tip, where WNS arrived last winter.

Together with fellow Commission biologist Cal Butchkoski, Turner is responsible for Pennsylvania’s bats. On this morning he’s wearing a T-shirt reading, “Bats Need Friends Too,” over which he’ll later button his Game Commission uniform. For years he and Butchkoski have traveled the state year-round, counting bats in hundreds of caves and mines, painstakingly detailing their movements and habits.

When WNS hit, they already knew what happened in New York, and were ready — not to stop the disease, though cave closures and decontamination protocols probably slowed its accidental spread by human cave visitors, but to study it.

As a result, Pennsylvania has become a giant WNS laboratory. Turner and Butchkoski make observations and gather samples used by dozens of researchers, especially Hazel Barton and Bucknell University bat biologist DeeAnn Reeder. Together they’re studying a myriad of basic biological questions that need to be answered before WNS can be understood, much less stopped. And of all their questions, none is more basic than this: Why do the bats die?

Portrait of a Killer

It may seem strange to still have this question. There is, after all, no shortage of dead bats to study. But the WNS outbreak cast into sharp relief just how much remains to be learned about the basic biology of the everyday world.

In bats, for example, there’s no such thing as a blood test of the sort that’s routinely administered to people and even our pets, giving a quick chemical and immunological profile of health. The bat immune system is, in Barton’s words, “a blank sheet of paper with a black box in the middle.”

At the ecological level, what many bat species eat, and even where they live for certain parts of the year, is almost as mysterious. And compared to fungi, bats are well-understood. Barton and Reeder were thrust into the forefront of WNS research not only because they’re good scientists, but because they were among the few people studying relevant questions when the disease hit.

Out of all this uncertainty, a picture of WNS has slowly emerged. At its center is G. destructans itself, which had not been identified before the outbreak. Like Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, the fungus responsible for chytridiomycosis in amphibians), it violates what had been a cardinal rule of fungal infections: They’re not fatal. Its unexpected nature is one reason it took several years for researchers to generally agree that G. destructans causes WNS.

Leading the characterization of G. destructans were researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. They sequenced the fungi’s genes, placing it within the otherwise innocuous Geomyces clade, found widely in soil — “myces” signifies fungus, “geo” means “of the Earth” — and describing its physical characteristics, in particular its telltale sickle-shaped spores. They also named it destructans, a straightforward and accurate appellation.

The bats’ eponymous white noses are just visible spore growth. The real damage occurs below. G. destructans lives on bat skin, invading hair follicles and sebaceous glands, forming pockets on the surface of exposed wings, breaking through into the epithelium beneath. There it breaks down connective tissue and muscle and nerves into digestible nutrients. Under a microscope, researchers liken G. destructans mycelium to spaghetti wriggling into meat. Another resemblance is the demon worms that consume animal flesh in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke.

How this progresses at a cell-by-level level is not known. At the other end of the scale, the chain of transmission between bats — whether it spreads in winter or fall or spring, if animals of particular life stages or habits are the primary vectors — is also uncertain. Also undetermined are the exact origins of G. destructans.

It may have come on a tourist’s boot or cargo stowaway bat from Europe, where G. destructans, or something very much like it, has subsequently been found, but in the absence of disease. Their apparent resistance suggests that modern European bats are descended from survivors of a prehistoric WNS epidemic, and G. destructans is “like smallpox arriving in the New World,” says Reeder. But it’s also possible that American G. destructans differs subtly from European, with some single, as-yet-unspecified mutation just happening to produce a skin-digesting enzyme.

Whatever its origins, G. destructans thrives in the cold favored by cave-dwelling, hibernating bats, which during hibernation cool their bodies to ambient temperatures. Among hibernators in general, this usually involves shutting down energy-intensive immune systems. “Here comes this cold-loving fungus, and it’s found immune-suppressed animals. They’re like HIV patients. It’s a perfect storm,” says Reeder.

With the help of temperature-recording sensors affixed to bat bodies and thermal cameras in caves, Reeder and other researchers have found that little brown bats, which briefly wake from hibernation every few weeks when healthy, rise every few days when infected. She suspects that arousal is a form of immune system “rebooting,” and that bats with WNS are trying to fight the disease.

Another proposed explanation comes from the USGS researchers, who note the importance of bat wings, which G. destructans reduces to the consistency of perforated tissue paper, to maintaining water balance and homeostasis. Autopsies of WNS-killed bats have found many to be so dehydrated that their tissues stick to researchers’ fingers. According to this hypothesis, infected bats wake, and can die, from thirst.

Both explanations could be right. The fungus may also release toxins, or open holes for secondary bacterial infections. Whatever the pathological constellation, waking from hibernation requires a rise in body temperature from 40 degrees to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Stoking biological furnaces burns quickly through the bats’ fat reserves. Looking for food, perhaps, or disoriented by dehydration, many fly outside, giving rise to another defining phenomenon of the disease: Bats flying out of caves in daylight, one by one for weeks on end, dying on the landscape in the middle of winter.

Amidst this carnage are a few cautiously optimistic notes. Field observations and Reeder’s work with captive bats suggests that WNS virulence varies by cave microclimate. Reeder, whose lab whiteboard is filled from top to bottom with the upcoming winter’s experiments, recently installed a set of environmental chambers that provide fine-tuned control over temperature and humidity for bats inside. If cold and dryness moderate the disease, she and the Pennsylvania biologists will try to manipulate real-world environments, sinking air shafts into hibernacula to create pockets of safety.

Other biologists, including former New York Department of Environmental Conservation biologist Al Hicks, have proposed designing “artificial hibernacula,” perhaps in repurposed World War II ammunition bunkers, where transplanted colonies of bats could be monitored and treated.

“You have no choice but to do everything you can do,” says Turner. “When you think of yourself as a conservationist in any way, it’s not to throw your hands up and say, ‘We’re fucked.’ There’s always a glimmer of hope somewhere.”

A World Without Bats

Cal Butchkoski, the other Game Commission bat biologist, echoes Turner. “How do you keep from despair? You have to maintain some hope,” he says. But a note of fatalism tinges the voice of Butchkoski, a thoughtful, soft-spoken man whose bat labors stretch back two decades, whose backyard bat colony is still big enough for him to have a mosquito-free beer on summer evenings. “There’s just so much we don’t know.”

On a crisp fall night in Amish farm country outside State College, Pennsylvania, Butchkoski is visiting a hibernacula where WNS was detected last year. He thinks that about half the bats died, though the count’s not official. On this night, he and three assistants are seeing what’s still alive. With plastic sheeting they seal the cave entrance, a nondescript-looking crevice in a streamside hollow, then cut a window-sized hole. Into the hole goes a harp trap, named for its resemblance to the musical instrument. Bats will hit the strings, and fall into a padded bag at the bottom.

Having set the trap, the researchers walk back to their trucks, and settle into folding chairs to wait. A bat detector relays a static hum from the cave entrance. A full moon rises. I think on a question implicit in the epidemic: What does it really matter if bats die?

There are different perspectives on this question.

One is at the level of organismal empathy. Infected bats undoubtedly suffer, perhaps in a manner people typically associate with larger, more charismatic animals. “It wouldn’t surprise me that bats have some sort of rudimentary language,” Bill Elliott, a bat biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, told me. “They have sophisticated social interactions. We think our big brains are the ultimate, but going in the other direction is just as good.”

Beyond the organismal level is that of species, not just one but a slew. The little brown bat has received the most attention, but the Eastern pipistrelle, Northern long-ear and endangered Indiana bat all appear equally vulnerable. Somewhat more resistant, but still imperiled, are big brown and small-footed bats. Those six species happened to be first in line in the northeast. In the past year, G. destructans was found in three southern species — the cave myotis, gray bat, and southeastern myotis. It remains to be seen how WNS will progress in them.

Altogether, more than half of North America’s 45 bat species may fit the cave-dwelling, hibernating WNS victim profile. And if one takes seriously the notion that the natural world is a collective treasure, a living museum several billion years in the making, then bats represent a whole wing of it. Losing half of them in North America is a bit like losing half our jazz musicians, or abstract painters, or novelists. Something unique and unreplicable will be gone.

The same argument extends to certain cave systems, especially in the southeast, where entire ecologies of cave-adapted animals rely on guano as a foundational nutrient source. “The consequences of losing the guano could be dire. It could mean these systems eventually run down,” said Elliott.

Not everyone shares conservationist sentiments. But there’s a utilitarian argument as well, short and sweet. Bats eat bugs. Lots of them. Little brown bats famously eat half their body weight in bugs each night, more if they’re nursing. Many of those insects eat crops.

The bottom-line value of their pest control is methodologically difficult to compute, but Boston University bat ecologist Tom Kunz made an informative try several years ago. In an eight-county region of south-central Texas, where Mexican freetail bats eat cotton bollworms and corn earworms, he calculated that bats save farmers roughly $740,000 annually — about one-eighth of total harvest value — in prevented crop damage and reduced pesticide treatments.

Early in the summer, before the region’s farmers typically start to use pesticides, the labor of each individual freetail was worth about $.02 per night. In a region where airborne bat densities are so great as to be visible on Doppler radar, it adds up.

Mexican freetails are probably safe from WNS, but Kunz’s figures are instructive. Some variant likely holds just about everywhere bats live. And contrary to the conventional expectation that evolution and ecology will find something else to do the bats’ job, their niche will almost certainly stay empty in any human-relevant timeframe. Nocturnal airborne insects are the sole province of bats, a food source they’ve exploited so completely and efficiently over the last 50 million years as to be without competition.

“There are people who say, ‘Well, birds will do better.’ No. They’re not going to eat the nocturnal insects,” says Reeder. And should a few bats prove genetically resistant to WNS, in sufficient numbers that some other environmental circumstance doesn’t finish them off, it will still take hundreds or thousands of years to recover.

The agricultural threat alone makes it all the more unreasonable that WNS researchers have been given a pittance of federal support.

The National Science Foundation has essentially ignored the disease. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, through which most WNS research and management is coordinated, spent $2.4 million on the disease last year, or slightly less than it expects to save through upgrades to departmental e-mail and data processing. Congress gave an extra $1.9 million in 2010, but that may have been a one-time event.

As of early November, the Department of the Interior’s omnibus appropriations budget, slated for a December vote, contained a $5 million WNS funding request. In this deficit-sensitive moment, however, such “earmarks” are an unpopular proposition.

Winifed Frick, a University of California, Santa Cruz bioinformaticist who with Kunz co-authored the Science paper on imminent little brown bat extinction, described meeting in October with the legislative aide of one prominent Senator.

“She said, ‘We’ve been asked to trim the budget. Unless you can show how this is going to help blue-collar jobs, I don’t know how this is going to get through,’” said Frick. “It’s a tough budget year. This would be considered an earmark. I get it. But it’s frustrating when $5 million is not a lot in terms of appropriations, and would make a huge difference in terms of our project.”

It should be noted that Butchkoski’s three technicians on the Amish farm count are seasonal contract workers and fit any non-industrial definition of blue-collar labor. But as they check the trap, thoughts of funding and politics are far away. The night’s haul is four northern long-ears. They submit graciously to Butchkoski’s inspections, opening their mouths in brief protest before settling down on the technicians’ thumbs. Their wings prove mercifully free of disease.

“I never thought I’d be so happy to see four northern long-ears,” he says. “Now we know they’re here. Thankfully, they’re still here.”

The Start of Winter

On a rainy mid-November morning, Hazel Barton and Greg Turner and DeeAnn Reeder’s students hike to the Durham iron mine outside Bucks County, Pennsylvania. First excavated by Winnebago Indians, then by colonial settlers, it was abandoned in the 19th century and eventually became home to about 8,000 bats.

When WNS hit last year, the researchers scrambled to test an antifungal compound that had shown laboratory promise. By the time they started, though, the outbreak was well underway, and the cages they built had holes. When the researchers came back two months later, the cages were empty, and the bats a brown sludge of decay on the floor. Dismaying results, but inconclusive: Maybe it would have worked if they’d started sooner, or if the bats hadn’t escaped.

The researchers have arrived earlier this year, with several new compounds and more reliable equipment. After crawling down a series of sloping, rubble-filled tunnels, they reach a central hallway. On one rust-colored wall, some long-ago vandal has spray painted, “Land of the Bats.”

Maybe a thousand bats are still left. Reeder’s students pick them from the walls, placing some in coolers for transport back to her lab, where they’ll live this winter. Others go into plywood treatment cages. Barton is secretive about the compounds, but allows that one is carvone, the candidate from last year. Three others are derived from antifungals identified by her research as produced naturally on bat skin.

Will the treatments work? “We’ll find out when come back in the spring,” says Barton.

Many other questions may also be answered by then. How will the southern and western spread of G. destructans play out? Will it be less virulent in warmer climes, in new species with different habits? Will some prove resistant, but carry it even further? Will it cross the Great Plains? Will it spread to the Great Lakes region, where it will almost assuredly be as destructive as in the northeast? In the northeast, will there be signs of resistance?

Asking bat researchers about this winter, two phrases keep coming up: “Holding our breath” and “Waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Several of Barton and Reeder’s compounds are aerosols, contained in bottles beneath the bats’ cages. To help with dispersal, they’ve been mixed with oils, aromatherapy-style. Improbably, Durham Mine fills with the scent of almonds. Barton bounds back and forth, peering into the cages. For all her earlier caveats about the limitations of treatment, her voice is full of excitement. As we leave, the cages recede into darkness.

On the drive up, Barton described how, during the trial’s first run, she’d expected to return to cages full of healthy bats, with others clinging to the outside, trying to get in. On the ride back, I ask if she still does.

“If I didn’t have that hope, I wouldn’t be doing this,” she says.

Images: 1) Indiana bat inspected by Brooke Slack at Carter Caves state park, Kentucky. 2) Little brown bats in Laurel Caverns, Pennsylvania. 3) A little brown bat with White Nose Syndrome in a limestone mine near Rosendale, New York. 4) Northern long-eared bat examined on a far near State College, Pennsylvania. 5) Little brown bat in a treatment cage in Durham Mine, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. 6) Treatment cage in Durham Mine. All photographs by Brandon Keim.

Call (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975 for fast, safe and humane bat removal in Central Virginia including the Richmond VA and Charlottesville VA areas.

Feds Criticized in Fight Against Killer Bat Disease

By Brandon Keim
November 12, 2010

As an apocalyptic bat disease threatens to spread across the United States, the stage is set for a showdown between the federal government and environmentalists who feel enough isn’t being done to stop it.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released the second draft version on Oct. 27 of its national response plan for White Nose Syndrome, which has killed more than a million cave-dwelling bats since emerging four years ago.

On the same day, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity issued a press release excoriating the plan, calling it a “slow-motion response” to a disease that’s already destroyed a major part of the animal kingdom in the eastern U.S., and shows no sign of slowing.

“You have to pick a model [for response] that’s appropriate to the situation,” said Mollie Matteson, a conservation advocate at the Centers for Biological Diversity. “I’m afraid this one will be perfected by the time White Nose Syndrome reaches California.”

Caused by a fungus that eats bat tissues and wakes them from hibernation too soon, White Nose Syndrome (WNS) has spread to 14 states and two Canadian provinces since the first cases were reported in 2006 in upstate New York. That state and Vermont have lost more than 90 percent of their bats, threatening populations with total extinction or, at best, a centuries-long recovery process.

The discovery in Oklahoma earlier this year of Geomyces destructans, the fungus linked to WNS, raised the nightmare possibility of the disease spreading west as well as south and east, conceivably exterminating most if not all 22 species of cave-dwelling, hibernating U.S. bats in the next few decades. It’s more than an animal tragedy: Those bats are major consumers of insects, filling a nighttime ecological niche shared by birds in the daytime. The loss could translate to booms of crop-eating insect pests, causing millions of dollars annually in agricultural damage and increased pesticide use.

Researchers and wildlife managers were caught off-guard by the outbreak, which is unprecedented in known mammal history. A handful of state biologists, federal researchers and conservationists scrambled to respond, tracking the disease and conducting basic research on shoestring budgets. The USFWS has coordinated the effort, and the draft plan represents the next, more mature stage of the fight.

For now, it’s largely an organizational document, stating priorities and establishing a framework for coordinating activities among dozens of federal and state agencies involved in a large-scale response. The plan also identifies seven key areas of action, including data sharing, developing reliable diagnostic tools, research on the fungus itself, and investigations of how WNS spreads and might be treated.

Each action area is universally regarded by white nose researchers and conservationists as important. But there is little specific detail in the plan, now two years in the making, or about how these actions will be pursued or funded. The plan “only provides a conceptual framework for responding to the disease,” said the Center for Biological Diversity in its press release. It “makes no concrete recommendations for research and management.”

According to Jeremy Coleman, the WNS syndrome coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service, such broad outlines had to come before specifics. “It’s important to lay out the groundwork,” he said. After a 60-day comment period, the draft plan will be revised. When that’s finalized next year, a detailed “implementation plan” will follow. “We’ve been doing all these other pieces that are critical to actual implementation,” said Coleman.

“As far as the plan goes, it’s fine,” said Nina Fascione, executive director of Bat Conservation International, a nonprofit conservation group that worked with the USFWS on developing the draft plan. “It’s just not that descriptive.” Fascione noted the inherent complexity and slowness of coordinating multiple government agencies, saying the proof of the plan will be in its implementation stage.

But Matteson said the federal effort doesn’t reflect the urgency of the disease, comparable in magnitude only to Chytridiomycosis, a disease that’s caused die-offs and extinctions in 30 percent of all amphibian species. “They’ve failed to put the crisis in that light,” she said.

The Center for Biological Diversity wants the USFWS to immediately declare a national wildlife emergency, develop a plan for closing caves to people who might pick up the fungus and spread it elsewhere, and dedicate $10 million for WNS funding in the next agency budget.

The USFWS is now spending roughly $2.4 million of its existing $2.87 billion annual budget on White Nose Syndrome research and management. While that $2.87 billion is a relatively small sum with which to manage a vast nation’s wildlife — more can easily be spent on a couple local highway projects — $2.4 million per year seems paltry in light of a threat to an entire ecological niche.

In comparison, the USFWS budget request for 2011 notes that improvements to its email system and data centers will save $2.45 million, or slightly more than its dedicated WNS funding.

Additional money has come from Congress, which gave the USFWS $1.9 million for White Nose in 2010. The money has been well spent, providing much-needed assistance to underfunded state wildlife agencies and supporting crucial basic research.

However, that $1.9 million was not included in the belt-tightening 2011 USFWS budget request, submitted to Congress by the Department of the Interior, its parent agency. According to an earlier version of the USFWS budget, “The Service proposes to discontinue this unrequested funding in [Fiscal Year] 2011 in order to fund higher priority conservation activities elsewhere.”

To stop the loss, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), who with Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-New Jersey) has been a vocal Congressional champion of White Nose funding, made a $5 million request in the Department of the Interior’s 2011 appropriations bill. That bill was supposed to be passed in September, but the vote was postponed until early December, when Congress will consider a multi-agency bundle of unpassed appropriations bills en masse.

Whether even a fraction of that $5 million will make it through is uncertain. The political climate is unfavorable to so-called “earmarks,” even when they’re vitally important.

But even if funding is scarce, “it wouldn’t cost much to say, ‘This is a wildlife emergency. We need all hands on deck. This is a total crisis,’” said Matteson.

Correction: I originally stated that Congress gave $1.4 million to the USFWS in 2008. That was wrong. The only Congressional money has been the $1.9 million voted on in 2009, and allotted for 2010. I also said that USFWS proposed to return $500,000 of it; instead, they proposed to return all of it. Many thanks to Peter Youngbaer of the National Speleological Society for this clarification.

Call us at (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975 for safe and humane bat removal from attic in Central Virginia including the Richmond VA and Charlottesville VA areas.

An Unprecedented Bat Die-Off Could Devastate U.S. Agriculture

By BRUCE KENNEDY Posted 9:45 AM 10/12/10

Most people don’t love bats, but like good health, you’ll realize that you miss them after they’re gone. Experts believe many species of bats may vanish pretty soon, and their disappearance could bring profound and long-term changes not only to the environment but also to agriculture, landscaping and gardening across North America.

For several years now, scientists have been sounding alarms about a devastating fungus, White-Nose Syndrome (WNS), that has literally decimated bat populations in the Northeastern U.S. The fungus leaves a white substance on the bat’s nose, wings and body, and disrupts the bat’s hibernation patterns, forcing it to burn through its fat reserves, which quickly leads to starvation. Earlier this year, a survey of the bat population in New Jersey estimated that 90% of that state’s bats had been killed off.

“This is on a level unprecedented, certainly in mammals,” says Rick Adams, a biology professor at the University of Northern Colorado and a renowned bat expert. “A mass extinction event, a thousand times higher than anything we’ve seen. It’s going through [bat colonies] like wildfire, with 80% to 100% mortality.”

“The disease is absolutely devastating, it’s unprecedented,” says Mylea Bayless, a biologist with Austin, Texas-based Bat Conservation International. “It’s causing population declines in wildlife that we haven’t seen since the passenger pigeon.”

Bayless notes that bats have slow reproductive rates, usually giving birth to just one pup a year. So bat populations, she says, are going to be very slow to recover, “if they ever do recover.” The disease, adds Bayless, “is moving at a pace that’s astonishing, about 450 miles per year. In four short years, it’s now closer to the Pacific Ocean than it is to its point of origination in Albany, N.Y.”

Your Billion-Dollar Bug Eaters

You might be saying good riddance, but think again. Bats are the primary predator of night-flying insects. That not only includes pests like mosquitoes but also insects like corn earworm moths and cotton bollworms. In their caterpillar forms, those insects can destroy crops. A 2006 study of several counties in South-Central Texas concluded that the local bat population had an annual value of over $740,000 a year as a pest control — or up to 29% of the value of the local cotton crop.

A bat eats 60% to 100% of its body-weight in insects every day. Adams says one colony of Mexican free-tailed bats in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, an important agricultural region, “pulls about 100 metric tons of insects out of the air in a year.” And having bats in agricultural areas, he says, tends to move insects out of those areas, creating less need for dangerous and expensive pesticides.

And like honey bee colonies — which have also been facing massive die-offs in recent years — some bats are important pollinators and seed-distributors. Adams says bats are crucial to the reproduction of tropical fruits like mangos, papayas, figs and wild bananas. And in Arizona, bats are the primary pollinators for three large cactus species that support much of the region’s ecosystem.

Government and Researchers Fight Back

The fungus associated with WNS is widespread in Europe, but it doesn’t affect bats there. No one is sure yet how it became so lethal to North America’s bat population — but there’s a possible human element. Scientists says WNS spores have been found on the clothing and gear of people exploring caves containing bat colonies. The pattern of its spread is also inconsistent with bat migration. “It went from Tennessee to Missouri and then to Western Oklahoma,” says Adams, “and it doesn’t seem like it would be moving like that if it was just bats.”

In the meantime, humans are fighting back. Adams is hosting a conference on the crisis later this month in Denver. The event is expected to draw hundreds of bat experts from around the world. The Forest Service is banning visitors to the thousands of caves and abandoned mines that dot the landscape in at least five Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states. And the Fish and Wildlife Service has awarded $1.6 million in grants for WNS research and control.

“But we all know that’s a drop in the bucket for a disease that’s sweeping the country and killing 95% of an entire group of animals,” says Bayless. “For some people, that may seem like money. . .not well-spent, but [what are] the economic and ecological consequences of losing an entire species? A little bit of money spent now will save us in the long term.”

Call us at (434) 270-0488 or toll-free at (888) 893-1975 for safe and humane bat removal in Central Virginia.