Biologists Check on Gray Bats Post-Storm

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As a thunderstorm passed overhead, Holland Youngman, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who started her college career as an art major, sheltered in an SUV and took the down time to decorate a foggy window with the subject of the evening鈥檚 work 鈥� a bat. Western North Carolina鈥檚 Pigeon River is named after the passenger pigeon, once the most numerous bird in North America, though now extinct, and on a recent July evening Youngman was part of a team of biologists working in the Pigeon River to see how a modern-day endangered species, the gray bat, fared against Tropical Storm Helene. 

Katherine Etchison, NC Wildlife Resources Commission, provides an overview for the evening's bat emergence count at a bridge across the Pigeon River, Haywood County, NC.

Gray bats are a wide-ranging species, though in Western North Carolina their presence is concentrated on the French Broad River basin, where they spend the warm-weather months roosting on bridges up and down the river and its tributaries. This also happens to be the North Carolina epicenter of Tropical Storm Helene鈥檚 impacts. In the fall of 2025, Helene brought wind gusts up to 92 MPH and enough rain to smash river flood records across the region, perhaps most dramatically in the South Toe River, which crested more than eight feet higher than the previous record. Utilities were knocked out for weeks, damage was measured in the billions of dollars, and ultimately more than 100 people died. People spent weeks and months tending to families and neighbors, awestruck by the destruction, with many still working to deal with the storm鈥檚 aftermath.

Katherine Etchison, NC Wildlife Resources Commission, discusses the evening's bat emergence count.

In a region defined by mountain rivers and forests, eventually questions about the storm鈥檚 impacts to the area鈥檚 wildlife began to arise. Sitting perpendicular to all those record flood waters? The bridges where endangered gray bats roost. Several known gray bat roost bridges were flooded when peak numbers of bats would be roosting.

Holland Youngman, US Fish and Wildlife Service, giving instruction on night-vision glasses to Sara Grace Dalton, NC Wildlife Resources Commission.

Getting an accurate picture of the storm鈥檚 wildlife impacts takes time as biologists collect data that can be compared to the pre-storm situation. For non-game wildlife, this data collection is largely carried on the shoulders of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission鈥檚 aquatic and wildlife diversity biologists, snorkeling rivers or trudging through wetlands, collecting data on everything from bats to freshwater mussels and forming the foundation of what we know about the status of imperiled animals in Western North Carolina. Biologists who lived through the storm 鈥� chain sawing downed trees, checking on neighbors - now going out and collecting the data that will tell the story of how well the region鈥檚 rarest animals weathered the most monumental storm known to hit the area.

Biologists head to the Pigeon River to conduct a bat emergence count.

For the gray bat in North Carolina, that effort is based on counting bats at three bridges considered to be among the most important roosting sites in the state for the species. The bats spend their days roosting in the bridge crevices, emerging at night to forage insects, and that transition provides biologists an opportunity. Biologist line up along both the up- and downstream-sides of the bridge, don night-vision goggles, train their eyes on an assigned crevice, and watch for bats to drop and take flight, dutifully advancing a handheld tally counter with each flying bat. At the end of the counting period, numbers from the biologists are tallied, and another data point is created.

Katherine Etchison and Kendrick Weeks, both NC Wildlife Resources Commission, count bats emerging from a bridge across the Pigeon River, Haywood County, NC.

On this July night, five staff members from the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission 鈥� Sara Grace Dalton, Katherine Etchison, Ellen Pierce, Joey Weber, and Kendrick Weeks - were joined by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, Holland Youngman. The six tallied a total of 401 bats emerging from the bridge. When combined with counts from the other two key roosting bridges, the summer 2025 count approached 2000 individuals, down 25% from the pre-Helene average 鈥� an important decrease, but not nearly as bad as it could have been. The emergence count came several weeks after Youngman, Service biologist Mark Endries, and NCWRC and N.C. Department of Transportation staff cleared the bridge鈥檚 nooks and crevices of storm-related debris in advance of the spring migration of gray bats into the area.

Holland Youngman, US Fish and Wildlife Service, counts bats emerging from a bridge across the Pigeon River, Haywood County, NC.
Joey Weber and Ellen Pierce, both NC Wildlife Resources Commission, tally the numbers from the evening's emergence count.

Story Tags

Bats
Biologists (USFWS)
Endangered and/or Threatened species
Monitoring
Rivers and streams