Celebrate Bat Week by coloring in our furry friends below! Right click on the image and click on “open image in new tab” and you can print and color! Happy Bat Week Everyone!
Blog Posts
This year the IBCP field team had four sites that were surveyed with most of them being in central Illinois. We set out a total of 31 nets this year and caught a total of 67 bats and five different species of bats. In 2025 we caught 46 big brown […]
2025 Mist Netting Recap
Bats consume a variety of mosquitoes but studies show they are likely a small percentage of their overall diet. Why aren’t bats eating more mosquitoes? Well, they are pretty small, which makes them hard to catch and not very high in calories. A bat flying around at night is probably […]
Are bats the solution to mosquitoes?
It was a busy field season capturing bats in southern, central, and northern Illinois! We set out a total of 57 nets and caught a total of 96 bats with the most diversity being caught in southern Illinois. We caught seven different species of bats this year! We caught 42 […]
2024 Mist Netting Recap
This September Champaign-Urbana hosted the first annual Central Illinois Bat Festival! Over 800 bat enthusiasts and bat-curious members of the community gathered at Anita Purves Nature Center and Crystal Lake Park to celebrate and learn about our furry skyward neighbors. The festival featured a little bit of something for everyone. […]
Getting a Little Batty in Central Illinois
This past weekend, Brittany and I were invited to join a winter hibernacula (winter bat roost) survey with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources alongside partners from multiple institutions across the country, all with the same goal – bat conservation. The purpose of these surveys is to get a count […]
A Weekend Underground with the Bats
It’s love day and everyone is included, even (especially), our sweet friends the bats! As a bat researcher and conservation biologist, it is easy for me to fall in love with these funky flying mammals, and it probably is for you too (if you are reading this blog in the […]
The Love Bat
We’ve had another exciting field season at IBCP! This year we focused our mist netting efforts in central and northern Illinois. We set out a total of 94 nets this year across four different sites and caught 62 bats! Our most exciting catch of the year was a Hoary bat! […]
2023 Mist Netting Recap
All bats in Illinois are obligate insectivores, meaning they only eat insects. Bigger bats eat harder insects like beetles, smaller bats eat smaller species like flies, but almost all of them LOVE moths1,2. There’s a wide range of sizes in moths, from the tiny micromoths with millimeters-wide wingspans to the […]
Echolocation Jamming Moths
It’s been a very busy summer here at IBCP! I want to thank our hard working field crews for a successful field season including: Abby Pagels, Ricky Gieser, Caroline Abramowitz, Jocelyn Karsk, Jordyn Chace, and IDNR staff. This year, we added 10 new grid cells (GRTS) to our acoustic surveys. […]