Clarity Tunnel Trip

Last weekend we braved the chilly weather and headed off to Clarity Tunnel (part of the Caprock Canyons State Park and on the Caprock Canyons Trailway)  to net for Tadarida brasiliensis.
The objective was capture individuals and  record their echolocation calls when we released them – this is how we slowly build up a library of reference calls for the acoustic transects. We met up with Dr Ray Matlack from WTAMU who has been working there for many years monitoring the populations, and he gave us a few pointers, so we had a harp trap suspended over the tunnel and two mistnets in the tunnel.

The bats weren’t very active because it was so cold, but we did manage to catch over 25 individuals in the mist-nets, which kept us busy. We got decent recordings from a good number of them the next morning when we released them.

One of the thousands of occupants of Clarity Tunnel — a Tadarida brasiliensis

Clarity Tunnel