Long-term acoustic assessment of bats on Big Sheep Creek in the Tendoy Mountains of southwest Montana and management recommendations for bats /

Abstract

recognized the importance of gathering yearround baseline information on bat activity in the region, setup contracts, and provided feedback on project implementation. Amie Shovlain, with the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, and Katie Benzel with the Dillon Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management provided feedback on the detector location and checked and maintained the detector on numerous occasions. Staff at Wildlife Acoustics assisted with questions regarding the SM2Bat+ ultrasonic detector/recorders and microphones and WAC to WAV and Kaleidoscope Pro software. Joe Szewczak provided Sonobat 3.0 software, feedback on its use, and the 2011 Humboldt State University Bat Lab's echolocation call characteristic summaries for western and eastern U.S. bats that we used to develop the call characteristic summary for Montana bats. John Horel with the MesoWest Research Group assisted with acquisition of weather station data through the MesoWest application programming interface. At the Montana Natural Heritage Program, Darlene Patzer assisted with grant administration, Susan Lenard assisted with hand review of bat calls, and Dave Ratz assisted with downloading of weather station data from the Mesowest application programming interface.