Photo By Stephen Hudson | Rebecca Boazman, a natural resource technician with the South Carolina National Guard,...... read more read more
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While many people automatically think Halloween when the word bat is mentioned, to the environmental staff with the South Carolina National Guard these flying mammals are a critical piece of environmental stewardship and military training.
On a warm autumn afternoon Rebecca Boazman, a natural resource technician at McCrady Training Center, visited multiple bat boxes across the 15,300-acre South Carolina Army National Guard training site on the backside of Fort Jackson. The purpose of her visit is to get a look at the bat population on post. This is done by sending a bore scope into rocket roosts and bat boxes, as well as walking through tunnels where bats commonly roost on this sprawling National Guard training site.
“Bats are amazing little animals. They do a lot more than we realize,” Boazman said. “Just because we don’t see it impacting us directly doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
Fifteen bat species call South Carolina home and eight of those species are found on McCrady. Two of those species are listed as threatened, which makes Boazman’s work, and the entire environmental staff, that much more important guaranteeing military training requirements are met while balancing environmental stewardship.
“We ensure there is no net loss of training opportunities and ensure readiness for National Guard service members through the lens of natural resources,” Boazman said. “We have several endangered and threatened species on the site and we ensure both can co-exist.”
There are two different ecosystems at McCrady – bats and Soldiers and both have to coincide.
While military readiness is a priority, the environmental staff are beholden to laws such as the Endangered Species Act.
“Because our main mission is to maintain military readiness, we have to marry those two,” Boazman said. “While they are out here, we can coexist to each their goals and achieve their training goals.”
Inspecting and tracking bats in the six rocket roosts and 28 bat houses stationed around 14 sites and six tunnels and five concrete roost towers at McCrady is part of Boazman’s job. In addition to the bat monitoring program here, the staff also monitors an additional four rocket roosts and two towers at the South Carolina Army National Guard Clark’s Hill Training Site in McCormick County.
“The rocket roosts are a newly constructed and developed artificial roost habitats that simulates a standing snag,” Boazman said.
The Environmental Services Office at McCrady serves as a liaison between regulatory authorities and the South Carolina National Guard. One of those agencies is the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.
“SCDNR has partnered with McCrady Training Center in the past to survey bats through mist netting, radio-tracking, acoustic surveys, and winter hibernacula counts,” said Jennifer Kindel, state bat biologist with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. “Through those efforts, McCrady has collected bat species richness data for the site and continues to monitor their bat populations.”
Kindel added that monitoring efforts include hibernacula counts of bats that roost in the old range tunnels and working with the National Wildlife Health Center to test the bats for White-nose Syndrome, a disease that’s been decimating bat populations since its arrival in the United States in the winter of 2006-2007.
The environmental staff at McCrady also monitors maternity colonies of endangered Rafinesque’s big-eared bats that use the bat towers placed in the woods, providing artificial roosts for the species. These artificial roost structures will last many years, giving the bats that call McCrady home a place to live and thrive.
“One of the leading threats to bat species is habitat loss. When the places bats normally forage and roost are destroyed, fragmented, or degraded, they cannot hope to survive or raise their pups,” Kindel said.
Though not all bat species will use artificial habitats, providing research tested bat boxes for species like big brown bats or artificial bat towers for state endangered species like the Rafinesque’s big-eared bat can provide a necessary roost when paired with nearby water and good foraging habitat.
Bats are integral part of the state’s ecosystem, but they are also of great economic importance to the state – they suppress nocturnal insect populations, including crop and forest pests, and reduce the need for costly pesticides. South Carolina’s bat native bat populations are insectivorous and according to the Department of Natural Resources bats save the agricultural industry $115 million annually in pest suppression services.
“People fear what they don’t understand,” Boazman said. “Bats provide a lot of ecosystem services.”
In one night, a colony of 100 little brown bats can consume 250,000 small insects and mosquitoes.
Work done by Boazman and the other members of the South Carolina National Guard’s Environmental Office are not only preserving these threatened species, but also ensuring Soldiers are achieving their vital training requirements improving readiness.
| Date Taken: | 11.22.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 11.22.2024 17:26 |
| Story ID: | 485916 |
| Location: | COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, US |
| Web Views: | 28 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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