June 16, 2000
Equipment stash work and new island site
Most of the daylight hours were spent further entrenching our makeshift encampment along the New River. Over the past few weeks we have caused aluminin shortages at every Lowe's between State College and Summersville in our ongoing attempt to create more collapsable poles than a army of nomadic circus folk. Today we doubled or tripled our mist net capabilities so that we may criss-cross the Kanawha multiple times if need be.

Top: Poles, poles, pole parts.

Middle: Casey, director of security, stands as a sentinel on the perimeter of our mobile metal shop.

Bottom: Everyone takes a break from poling. Neil Bossart, Tom Malabad, Dave Wayland, and Project Biologist and official pole inspector Chris Sanders. We are researching ways to ultilize the poles during the off season. Here we are testing the pole joint at high temperatures as part of our "lightweight, extendable camp cooking spit".

Bottom, bottom left: Breaktime is over, assembly line is started once again.

Bottom, bottom right: Everyone is doing just one heck of a job. I managed to pretend to be doing something important on this computer and successfully dodged real work. But, look at all the spiffy photos our digi-cams make!!
This evening I did do some sort of work as we put in at Smithers for a rather lengthy powerboat ride to Wheeler Islands. We set up four seperate net sets, a triple high, a double high, and two singles. The site was a wetlandish area between the islands which floods over in high water. This area of the river is quite deep and site selection over water is rather limited. We assumed bats would be zinging in and out of the cover throughout this area, but apparently the animals had other plans. Sooner or later one of these islands is going to pay off, I hope.

The second team back at Gauley Bridge took in another 60+ bats, with still the bulk being female. There were no recaptures from the previous night....thats a lot of little browns!
Below left: Single high over a prominant point in the wetland. Very deep water prevents nets from being erected directly over the river.

Below right: The triple high set being prepared to block the flyway over the wetland.

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