North Carolina coastal plain. Most are 

 near the Yeopim River in Chowan 

 County, discovered by volunteer Paris 

 Trail of Edenton. Otherwise, the bats 

 have been found living in abandoned 

 buildings, hanging from walls and 

 rafters, along portions of Yeopim 

 River and the Black and Cape Fear 

 rivers in Bladen County. 



Clark focused on 

 these areas because the 

 bat seems to prefer 

 swampy, undisturbed 

 habitats that resemble 

 the forests it enjoyed 

 before development and 

 logging pressures set in. 



"These happen to be 

 areas where there are 

 still some mature forests 

 that contain trees with 

 extensive cavities," she 

 says. "And I think these 

 bats require that kind of 

 habitat. Mature forests 

 are rare and are disap- 

 pearing very rapidly. 

 Even with wetlands 

 regulations, there's still a 

 lot of pressure on mature 

 forested wetlands." 



The eastern 

 big-eared bat lives 

 throughout the south- 

 eastern United States, 

 from the Dismal Swamp 

 in Virginia south and 

 west through the coastal 

 states to eastern Texas. It 

 is known from south- 

 eastern Oklahoma and 

 western and southern 

 Arkansas up the Missis- 

 sippi River Valley to 

 southern Illinois, southern Indiana and 

 western Kentucky. Isolated popula- 

 tions have also been found in southern 

 Ohio, eastern Kentucky, Tennessee 

 and central West Virginia. 



But few records of this bat are 

 available in most states within its 



unsighted for most of the first half of 

 the 20th century, Clark says. A few 

 sightings in the 1960s broke the 

 50-year dry spell, but its numbers are 

 thought to be declining. 



Today, it remains one of the 

 nation's least understood bats. 



Not for lack of trying, however. 



David Lee, N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences 



range. 



In North Carolina, it went 



The bat appears to live in small colonies in old swamp forests, 

 but the future of this habitat is uncertain. 

 Tliese cypress stumps were cut in Bladen County. 



Clark has invested 10 years in bring- 

 ing to light the lifestyle of this bashful, 

 nighttime creature. Unlike some bats, 

 it is shy of people and activity. It lives 

 quietly in the coastal plain where the 

 critical combination of water, forest 

 cover and suitable roost sites occur 

 close together. 



Clark's search for the ambling 



forest bat had simple beginnings. She 

 knew it was rare. So she began in 1984 

 by looking for it in old, abandoned 

 buildings in Sampson and Bladen coun- 

 ties as she drove from Raleigh to visit 

 her parents in Elizabethtown. There 

 were records of it in Bladen County 

 from the 1960s, so chances were good 

 that she'd find some. 



The inspections of 

 old buildings paid off. 

 Her flashlight began to 

 fall on nursery colonies 

 of adult females and 

 their offspring, usually 

 bom in late May and 

 early June. The solitary, 

 smaller males were 

 found living apart from 

 the colonies in the sum- 

 mer. By fall, however, 

 the males merge with 

 the females and young 

 to hibernate through the 

 winter. 



Encouraged by her 

 early findings, Clark 

 resolved to drive every 

 road in Bladen County, 

 systematically searching 

 for bats in abandoned 

 buildings. This inten- 

 sive inventory gave her 

 an eye for what passed 

 as a good "bat house." 

 And she learned that if 

 she looked hard enough 

 in the right places, she 

 could find these bats 

 where they hadn't been 

 spotted in decades. 



"We found the 

 big-eared bats, and we 

 found quite a few of 

 them, compared to having nothing," she 

 says. "But when we were finding them, 

 the colonies were small, very small." 



In the meantime, Trail was coming 

 across the bats roosting in old buildings 

 as he rummaged through Chowan 

 County woodlands. But this avid natu- 

 ralist and wildlife photographer, retired 

 from New York state, had never before 



1 8 MARCH/ APRIL 1994 



