Bat work in the Peruvian Amazon

By Matthew Kline (’24).

This past summer, I spent over seven weeks at a research station in the Peruvian Amazon gaining hands-on research experience.  Most of my work was with bats, but I was also able to assist the bird, herp, caiman, and mammal teams with their research.  I learned how to set up and take down mist nets, how to identify bats to species level using less-obvious features (size, mass, dental formula, etc.), how to handle bats, how to take measurements on bats, and how to extract bats from mist nets.  Other than bats, I learned one grip for handling birds, honed my acoustic and visual bird identification skills, learned how to restrain a defensive snake, and made connections with graduate students, undergraduate students, and researchers.  I was also able to help three other interns with their projects, one of which involved camera trapping for mammals,  another that was investigating the effects of mercury pollution on caimans, and one which was looking at the microhabitat preferences of the frog Pristimantis reichlei.  I also discussed with the head bat researcher at the station about potentially working on a project designing bat boxes for bats with different roost preferences.