Title: Population ecology of the little brown bat, Myotis lucifugus, in Indiana and north-central Kentucky / by Stephen R. Humphrey and James B. Cope.
Abstract:THE secretive behavior and nocturnal activity of bats makes them difficult to observe.Casual observation is limited to hibernating bats, to the occasional bat flitting after insects at twilight, or to...THE secretive behavior and nocturnal activity of bats makes them difficult to observe.Casual observation is limited to hibernating bats, to the occasional bat flitting after insects at twilight, or to an uninformative squeak or odor emanating from a daytime roost.The development of marking techniques and the establishment of a Federal Bat-Banding Office to issue bands and process recapture data made it possible to identify and follow individual bats over long distances and time spans.Bat banding projects combined with regular recapture programs have pro- duced great amounts of ecological data.When the second author began teaching mammalogy in 1950, relatively little was known about the natural history of bats.The present study was begun to provide to students and the public some new information on biology of bats in the eastern UnitedStates.Read More