Field Notes from 2025: Monitoring Bats in a Changing Appalachia

“As I reflect on the past year as a Research Assistant at Highlands Biological Station, my thoughts keep circling back to one project in particular—and to the opportunities, lessons, and collaborations it has offered. Under the guidance of Dr. Rada Petric, I’ve spent the year monitoring 13 abandoned mine and cave sites for bat activity, primarily throughout the Nantahala National Forest.

A few recent days in the field seem to capture the collaborative spirit that has defined this work, which has become deeply meaningful to me over the past 12 months. Just last week, I found myself walking familiar ground on the outskirts of Franklin, NC. On that Thursday, our field team included Dr. Petric’s UNC–Chapel Hill graduate student Cameron McClellan, undergraduate student interns Addie Melton and Savannah Carter, U.S. Forest Service Wildlife Biologist Johnny Wills, and a cheerful neighborhood dog who escorted us all the way to the site.

We dropped into the woods from a steep Forest Service road, our canine companion leading the way. Mica-flecked quartz glinted along the path—our first clue that we were nearing the mine opening. After a short hike, we reached the gated entrance of an abandoned mica mine. Over the next hour, we checked ultrasonic bat detectors, programmed trail cameras, created a LiDAR scan of the mine passage, and conducted a geological profile of the site. As we made our way back down the road—after a quick game of fetch, of course—we chatted excitedly about the hibernating tricolored bats we had seen deep in the cave.

While I’m grateful to say that days like this have been plentiful, the work is often sobering. White-nose syndrome—a fungal disease that has caused devastating population declines in 90% of North America’s bat species—shadows every day spent in the field and every hour spent analyzing data in the lab. It’s the reality that drives our research and underscores its urgency.

But like all conservation work, small wins are everything. Just one day after our field excursion with Johnny, we discovered 27 hibernating tricolored bats at another abandoned mine site—significantly more than we had ever recorded in the two years we’ve monitored the site.

It’s days like these—filled with hope, collaboration, and genuine excitement about the work we’re doing—that define my 2025 at Highlands Biological Station.”

– Adriana Kirk, Highlands Biological Station Research Assistant