This last weekend was the annual hibernating bat count. A little background: the caving club, or ‘grotto’ as they are know, that I am a member of (and also secretary for), has been volunteering to count hibernating bats for better than 15 years for the state of New Mexico. There are about 8 caves in NM that are on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land that are listed as ‘hibernaculum’ for bats, and thus, closed for caving from November through March. As such, the BLM has had an ongoing project to count the number of hibernating bats each year to determine bat populations, locations, and etc. We do this at the end of January each year so as to get a good count near the end of the hibernation, but only every other year for each cave, that is, we alternate caves each year. Please note that these caves are OFF LIMITS during the hibernating period, the only way we can go in is by having a small group on a very special permit and by having a volunteer agreement in place to do this work.

That having been said, this year’s count went rather well. We did counts in two caves, Torgac and Fort Stanton. It was, as always, an adventure (but not like last year!). Read on for the whole story.

The weekend began on Saturday morning with a 3 hour drive south to near Roswell. Just north of Cline’s Corners, the road began to get kinda snowy. As we continued south, it got worse and worse, which made us worry a bit about the road conditions to the cave.

The road was down to a single lane, with a 4-6 foot high snow bank on one side of the road. The other side of the road (a divided 4 lane) was completely clear, but, inexplicably, closed to traffic.

Near Encino, the road cleared up, and it was completely clear the rest of the way down.

 

 

We arrived on site of Torgac cave around 10ish AM. I had never been to this cave before, but I thought I knew where it was. Turns out I was entirely wrong, or at least, about 15 miles off. Torgac was another GypKaP cave, something I had not expected. It is -quite- the cave for this kind of area.

Most of the caves out here are fairly decently sized, but this one had all kinds of nice formations and large rooms which you just don’t find otherwise.

We geared up and discussed a plan. Bill would, as normal, be the photographer. Brian was to help him with notes. Jen was in charge, Gosia and I were to help her with the ‘manual’ count (ie, writing down on paper bat types and numbers and locations). Dan, the BLM guy, was able to make it this year, and he brought a friend, Nancy (who I think was his girlfriend, but not sure).

Here’s me in my gear:

We headed to the cave, and started our way in. Climbing down to the gate was pretty easy, and just beyond that we had to do a little chimney across a climb down, and then a tad bit of bouldering on down into the cave. The trick here is to be in, and out, nice and quiet, to minimize the impact on the bats.

Depending on the species of bat, some like it cold, and some like it hot. It seems 38-42F is about the temp they like to be. Also, some like to cluster in large clumps, other hang out by themselves. For instance, the Small-footed Myotis bat likes to clump up, but the Townsend’s Long Ear bat likes to sleep alone (or in very small clumps). As we entered the ‘dark zone’ of the cave (the section where light does not penetrate) we began to see small numbers of bats hibernating. All of us worked back into the Circle Room and made a sweep, counting bats. Jen, Gosia and I headed out to go down to the Formation Room, leaving Bill and Brian the task of going into the Bat Nursery (a breeding area for bats during the active season). Apparently there is a large amount of bat guano (aka, bat droppings) in this room, and I was somewhat glad I was not going that way. Later, we found out there was only a handful of bats there. The three of us worked our way slowly down the big hallway, and as we entered the Formation Room, a somewhat quiet, but definitely angry chirping greeted us. Bats use a supersonic signal to navigate, but they will also make audible squeaking noises to alert each other to the presence of an intruder (and also to warn us to back off, or at least that is my feeling). We found several large clusters here, 300 to 800 with one very large cluster of 2000. Two years ago in this area there was a 3 foot by 5 foot wide cluster that consisted of over 8000 critters!

We continued on to the Bat Room, where we found many many small clusters. Staying low and quiet, we split into two teams and counted them up. We left here just as Brian and Bill joined up with us. While they photographed some of the big clusters (we estimate in the field the number in a cluster based on a guessed square footage, and take a quick photo; later, Bill spends time with a pink dot in his favorite image editor and counts each bat in the group for an accurate assessment of the number present). The three of us continued down into the cave, with diminishing numbers of bats. Once they mostly petered out, we turned back.

The last little bit was to go out to the Crawl and ultimately to the Football Room to finish the count. There was some 800 bats in an upper section of the Crawl, and a handful of them in the Football Room, which is literally just that big. Huge stuff for a gypsum cave! There were also some very large ‘macro crystals’ here of gypsum.

After this, we were done with Torgac. It had taken us about 4 hours. Initial numbers indicate almost 12,000 bats of several different species were present this year. Two years ago there were 14,000 in this cave. The ‘normal’ average for this cave, historically, is about 4,000. This huge jump is hypothesized to be due to a wildfire on a nearby mountain about 3 years ago. The assumption is that there is an unknown cave somewhere on the mountain that is typically a bat hibernaculum, but due to the fire, has fallen out of favor with the bats, and they have come here instead. This is only one of many possible reasons.

 

We headed out of the cave and back to the car. The plan was to head to Capitan and try out a new restaurant that Laura had recommended. She had spent the day in the truck, as although she normally went with us underground, today she was not feeling well. We met up at the “Horsemen’s Restaurant”. Interesting place. However, it was somewhat busy, and we kind of fell off the end of the attentions of the waitress, and it took almost an hour to get food. We hardly noticed, though, we were having too much fun catching up. This group of folks has been doing the counts for a long time, and have a lot of history. I had only joined in their ranks in the last 3 years, and this was Gosia’s first trip with us in this capacity (most of us had caved with her in the past, although I had not). I really enjoy this, as it feels like a big family. We seem to work really well together underground as well, which is very important in being able to pull off a count like this each year.

After dinner, we went to the ‘bunkhouse’, which is just that, an old bunkhouse near Fort Stanton that the BLM owns, and allows cavers to use. I was glad I was not going to have to camp out in the overnight low of 25F. As per norm, after getting everything set up, we fixed up some margaritas and sat around talking and joking into the night.

 

The next morning we got up to get ready to goto Ft Stanton cave, which was nearby. Bill was not feeling well and decided to remain behind. The rest of us headed back to Capitan for breakfast at the Smokey Bear (in case you were wondering, Capitan is where Smokey the Bear came from, really). I had eggs, ham, and a WAFFLE. I love waffles, and I was very happy to find a meal that had eggs AND a waffle. Yummy.

 

Ft Stanton cave is very much an important historical cave in New Mexico. It is one of the largest ones in the state, and ‘known’ humans have been going into it since the 1800s when soldiers from the nearby Fort Stanton explored it. There is even a signature wall in one passage with signatures that date back to the late 1800s. These days, we would call that ‘cave graffiti’, but it is now old enough to be called ‘historic’, haha. Recently, cavers digging a passage dubbed ‘Priority Seven’ (named after a part of some obscure sci-fi show, I am told) broke into a new section of the cave called ‘Snowy River’, which is ‘virgin’ passage (ie, never had humans in before) that consists of a large tube with a snowy white floor. Only a handful of cavers have been inside it, and right now, Priority Seven has been permanently closed due to an extreme sketchiness of the rock stability. A new passage is underway to re-connect to the passage for further exploration, but it will be a while before that happens. In other recent news, the State of New Mexico is considering a bill that would make the lands above the cave into the ‘Fort Stanton-Snowy River National Cave Conservation Area’ to protect the lands from commercial interests for the pursuit of research and preserving this natural resource. I hope the bill passes.

After heading through the gate at the fence, we continued into the cave and took the left hand fork to investigate the bat count in the Bat Room. This passage has its own gate, which apparently had not been opened in a while. Silt had built up, requiring us to scoop out the dirt at the base of it to get it open big enough to squeeze through. The Bat Room only had a small number of Townsend bats. We left and locked the gate, and headed into the main area of the cave.

Dan and Nancy had already opened the gate and were waiting for us. Just inside the gate were small numbers of bats. As we continued in, we found more bats, but all in small numbers. Typically we would find about 800 bats here, but this year, there was only about 570 guys. Ft Stanton was really dry here compared to past years (there used to be a wooden boat in one part of the cave, but that was way before my day), but today even the clay mud was mostly dry. I shot a couple of pictures on the way out of a couple of bats on the ceiling, since Bill was not with us to do it. Total time in the cave was just over an hour.

We headed back out to the trucks. While we were standing around, we spotted this little guy on a nearby rock:

Guess the bugs are out early this year, yuck.

I hope you enjoyed my write up. It turned out far longer winded that I had planned. All in all, this was a great weekend. I look forward to it each year, as it serves for a nice wind down from the holidays and a good kick in the pants for getting projects underway for the near year. I will post some of Bill’s photos once I get them from him, provided he is OK with that, so you can get a better idea of what a cluster of bats looks like. My photos above were taken from pretty far away, and the bats just look like dots.

Regardless, feel free to ask me questions, and I will do my best to answer them.