Biology trip reports and stats
Participants – Bill Gee
John Roth
Pamela Hart
Time in = 9:45am, time out = 1:00pm
In mid-October we received a trip permit request from Dr. Pamela Hart. No one had any idea who she was, but the trip permit mentioned Matt Niemiller who we have worked with in the past. After further discussion with Dr. Hart we figured out this was a legitimate request. Jeff Page left it to me as leader of the Biology Project to make appropriate arrangements.
Participants – Bill Gee
Kristen Godfrey
Matthew Hernandez
John Roth
Martin Carmichael
Time in 0915, time out 1815.
This was the annual bat census trip in Carroll Cave. We run this trip near the end of October every year. This year, besides counting bats, we had an additional task to exchange batteries and memory card in the bat roost detector in the Mountain Room. We also moved the bat roost detector to a new position that gives it a better view of the passage to the natural entrance.
Guano pile quick check
Participants – Bill Gee
Rita Worden
Seth Colston
Time in – 8:00am, Time out 11:00am
For many years we have assumed that Carroll Cave was a summer host to a maternity colony of grey bats. The bats use several guano piles located in Carroll Passage upstream from the Lunch Room. We have done trips through there in October for about 15 years. The guano gauges always show signs of use at sometime in the previous year. We have never had any more accurate idea of when the bats are roosting over the guano piles.
Participants – Bill Gee
Seth Colston
John Roth
Martin Carmichael
Hou Zhong
Rita Worden
Time in 9:15am, Time out 5:20pm
The weather situation for this trip was very dicey. We did not know what we were going to do until we got into the cave. The forecast for the night before the trip was for 1 to 2 inches of rain. Some rain did fall, but it was only 0.15 inches which is not enough to seriously affect the stream level. The daytime forecast called for showers after lunch. A shower did indeed happen, but less than 0.10 inch.
Participants – Bill Gee (Trip leader)
Hou Zhong
Seth Colston
Kristen Godfrey
Nathan Taylor
Time in – 9:50am
Time out – 5:30pm
In October 2020 during the annual bat census trip, we placed a bat roost logger in the Mountain Room. The main goal of this trip was to retrieve the memory card for analysis. We also installed new batteries in the roost logger, added some stuff to the Mountain Room rescue cache and searched for evidence of bats in an upper level passage.
