Five of the Six

On summer nights at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, a research team led by Dr. Radmila Petric strings fine mist nets across a service road and waits for the dark to do the rest.

Bats caught in the netting are worked up on the spot — species, sex, weight, wing measurements — and the tricolored and northern long-eared bats among them are fitted with radio transmitters not much larger than a pill. The night runs until two in the morning. In daylight the team drives the base with a five-foot antenna, sweeping for a signal, and then walks it down on foot until it leads them to a tree.

That tree is the whole point. A roost location is a piece of information the base can act on: where the animals actually are, and therefore what belongs in the conversation when decisions get made about training areas, construction and how the land is managed.

White-nose syndrome is a fungal disease that takes hold in hibernating bats, rousing them through the winter until they burn through the fat reserves meant to carry them to spring. Since it reached North America it has moved through cave-hibernating species with extraordinary speed. Tricolored bat populations have fallen by roughly ninety percent, and North Carolina listed the species as state-endangered in 2022.

Which is why roost locations matter so much. A bat that survives the winter still needs somewhere to raise a pup in July, and you cannot protect a place you have not found. Everything this team does on those summer nights runs toward putting those places on a map.