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Senike! Se Pe haingual athe? aia . POPULATION TIS25S AGD jelavey IeNursery Populations URING the warm months female and a few male M. lucifugus D congregate in nursery colonies where the females bear and rear their young. Fifty nurseries were found in Indiana. Cope et al. (1961) published a map of the 38 nurseries found by the end of 1960. Periodic samples were taken at 23 nurseries (Fig. 1) that were accessible for study and had large populations.Most nursery roosts were in attics of houses and churches, and a few were in barns or school buildings. Most populations occupied single buildings, but several large groups ('Thorntown, Franklin, Brookville, Tunnelton, Shoals) used from two to four buildings, such as a house and nearby barn or several houses in a small town. Movement records show that such a group behaved as a single population. One group was found in an elm tree (Ulmus americana) near Williamsburg, Wayne Co., Indiana, on 22 May 1967. Approximately 15 bats flew from under loose bark when the tree was pushed over with a bulldozer. 'Three captured individuals were adult female M. lucifugus. 'This site could have been a spring transient roost rather than a nursery. Although M. lucifugus in the wild is thought to locate nurseries in trees and rock crevices, no such roosts have been reported previously. The only other reports of nurseries not in buildings are two populations in caves in Illinois (Myers, 1964) and one (M. I. carissima) in an Oregon Cave (Bailey, 1936).Most roosts were hot, dark, poorly ventilated, and contained several small access holes in the roof, eaves, or walls. The species sometimes occurred in the well-lighted and ventilated attics or open barns commonly inhabited by the big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus. High nursery temperature may be a key factor in the energetic economy of reproduction and growth. Davis (1967b) suggested that this species may require high nursery temperatures, which promote rapid growth of the young.Studier and O'Farrell (1972) found that pregnant female M. 1. occultus and young less than 10 days old were poor thermoregulators. We commonly observed behavioral thermoregulation similar SUMMARY 1. This study was conducted in Indiana and_ north-central Kentucky from 1952 to 1969. Little brown bat populations in buildings and caves were periodically counted and sampled. A total of 71,706 bats was banded, and 10,760 individuals were recaptured a total of 14,336 times.

Entrances to many caves occupied by the endangered Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis) have been modified to control human access. We show that modifying cave entrances can degrade the bats’ winter habitat, we demonstrate one mechanism by which this damage occurs, and we document a restoration experiment. We compared a large bar population in an unmodified cave with a small, reduced bat population in a cave with warm winter temperatures resulting from an entrance wall that impeded air exchange. In the modified cave, mean winter temperature at the hibernation site was 5.0° C higher than in the unmodified cave, bats entered hibernation at a 5% higher body mass, bats lost 42% more mass and the frequency distribution of late‐winter mass was truncated, with no bats weighing less than 5.4 g. The results describe unacceptable extremes for hibernation: subfreezing temperatures and warm temperatures causing mass‐loss rates of more than 0.009 g/day. Over a decade following removal of the entrance‐constricting wall, the population increased from 2,000 to 13,000 bats. Previous recommendations, based on common‐sense observation, to open blocked cave entrances are confirmed by this study. The similar case of Coach Cave, Kentucky, offers the potential for recovery of 100,000 Indiana bats.