Workshops

Bat Conservation and Management Workshops

North American venues for 2012: Arizona, California and Pennsylvania

BCI’s field-study workshop program has provided training to hundreds of wildlife biologists, educators, and other serious students of bat conservation.

Through hands-on experience, participants in these 6-day, 5-night sessions learn bat conservation and research techniques including netting, trapping, radio-tracking, night-vision observation, and habitat assessment. (Rabies pre-exposure vaccination is required for participants to handle bats.)

BCI has a very limited number of scholarships available for qualified participants to assist with registration costs. If you are interested in applying click on the workshop you are interested in attending and fill out the application in the "additional forms" section.

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Advanced Capture Techniques

North American venues for 2012: Arizona and Pennsylvania

This workshop offers experienced biologists the chance to explore more advanced monitoring and capture techniques, highlighting both contact and noncontact methods for conducting bat inventories and survey programs.

The course is intended for graduates of previous BCI field courses and is designed for wildlife biologists, researchers, and consultants needing assistance with implementing their own bat monitoring programs.  We will employ physical capture techniques with passive bat-detector monitoring, video-monitoring, active acoustic monitoring, mobile acoustic transect inventory plans with the goal of adequately sampling bat diversity at monitoring sites.

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Acoustic Monitoring Workshops

North American venue for 2012: California

These workshops are designed to give hands-on experience with bat detectors and guided practice sessions making recordings in the field, designing acoustic inventory protocols and performing species-identification analysis.

The courses are taught by leading acoustic-monitoring experts with extensive practical knowledge in the use and capabilities of heterodyne, frequency-division, time-expansion and direct recording detectors.

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Cave and Mine Gating Workshops

Since 1998, BCI has been cosponsoring cave and mine gating workshops with the American Cave Conservation Association, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, California Department of Conservation and many others. Evening lectures discuss gate designs relative to varied situations and bat species, how to recruit volunteers and partners, selection of materials and equipment, safety and much more. By day, participants get hands-on experience measuring, moving, cutting and welding steel to construct bat-friendly gates built at nearby caves or mines.

For information on or to collaborate on co-sponsoring a gating workshop, contact us at caves@batcon.org, 512-327-9721.