On Friday night we went to Moore State Park to watch the bats leaving their roost for the night. This has always been a great adventure as one could watch 500 - 600 bats leaving the shed.  We had an unexpected treat, as Thomas Kunz Ph. D.  from Boston University was also there doing a survey.  Dr Kunz is the director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology (CECB).
Dr Kunz has been studying bats for more than 20 years and has been involved with the bat shed at Moore State Park for many years.  Dr Kunz has a camera on the shed pointed at the location where the bats fly out from on their nightly excursions.  The camera is on a timer and feeds information directly to the professors lab at BU. 

It was an eye opening experience to say the least.  According to Dr Kunz this bat shed housed upwards of 600 - 800 little brown bats, and due to the small numbers they were recording on the camera each night he was at the park to do a survey.  The little brown bat is in serious trouble from the white nose syndrome and related concerns.

He said that they estimate close to 1 million bats have died from White-Nose Syndrome in the northeastern US during the past two years. What does this mean?  Well, for starters a bat can eat half of its body weight in bugs each night.  That translates into 630 tons of bugs that have not been eaten each night due to the demise of the million bats.  Scary stuff! 
The final bat count on this night was 41 bats.  This colony is down 95%.  A serious concern indeed.

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