A Mine of Its Own
Where miners used to dig, an endangered bat now flourishes, highlighting a new use for abandoned mineral sites
- By Douglas H. Chadwick
- Smithsonian magazine, May 2004, Subscribe
Many of the 46 bat species in North America (an Indiana bat, about half its actual size) are threatened by loss of hibernation. Merlin D. Tuttle/Bat Conservation International
One December afternoon, we walk straight into the hill, trading the winter woodland’s gray light for a shadow world of stone. The air grows still and moist. The tunnel divides, turns, then divides again. Suddenly, the darkness is so dense I feel I have to push it aside, only to have it close in behind me. Most of the passageways are roomy enough—about 20 feet high and 30 feet wide—to keep claustrophobia at bay.
We are inside the Magazine Mine, part of a 2,100-acre property near Tamms, Illinois, owned by UNIMIN Specialty Minerals Inc. The company worked the mine from 1972 to 1980, digging 20 acres of tunnels reaching as deep as 300 feet to extract microcrystalline silica, a fine quartz sand used in products like lens polish, paint and pool cue chalk.
The first bats we see are tiny, grayish, thickly furred Eastern pipistrelles. They’re hibernating, hanging upside down with their wings folded. Beads of condensation coat their fur. In the light of our headlamps, they look like strange, glistening underworld fruits. Farther along are Northern long-eared bats, big brown bats and little brown bats. At last we come to Indiana bats, Myotis sodalis, no larger than mice, huddled in groups of one or two dozen. The animal’s pink nose distinguishes it from other small, brownish bats.
Then, on the upper curve of a light-colored wall is what appears to be a tacked-up beaver pelt. But in actuality, it’s more Indiana bats—about 2,000 of them, says Joe Kath, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and the leader of our subterranean expedition. “From photographs, we’ve counted 300 animals per square foot in clusters like this,” he says, “and sometimes as many as 500.” Each furry throng we encounter bodes well for the Indiana bat, which has been classified as endangered since 1967, and also for the Bats and Mines Project, an unusual collaboration between conservationists and industry officials.
Out of the roughly 5,416 known species of warmblooded, milk-producing vertebrates, at least 1,100 are in the order Chiroptera, Latin for “hand-wing.” In other words, about one out of every five kinds of mammal belongs to the much-reviled and still poorly understood group we call bats. North America is home to 46 bat species; most are insectivorous, with some consuming more than their weight in bugs in a matter of hours, and most have undergone substantial population declines. In addition to the Indiana bat, five North American species are officially endangered: the lesser long-nosed bat, the Mexican long-nosed bat, the gray bat, the Ozark big-eared bat and the Virginia big-eared bat.
Indiana bats, once so abundant in the East and Midwest that a single cave might hold millions, slipped below one million total population in the 1960s and at last count, in 1999, numbered only around 350,000, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Some experts predict that if current population trends continue, the species might be extinct as soon as 2030. The primary known cause of the decline is one that most bat species in the United States are facing: loss of hibernacula, or sites in which they can hibernate undisturbed.
A hibernating bat, with its heartbeat and breathing and body temperature all decreased, is exceedingly vulnerable, and people have destroyed entire wintering colonies, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently. Just rousting a bat out of hibernation may eventually kill it; its small body has just enough fat in reserve to get through the winter, and awakening the animal consumes precious fuel. Large caves have been emptied of bats by vandals, explorers, spelunkers and tourists. With undisturbed caverns becoming scarce, North American bats have increasingly turned to abandoned mines as a last resort.
As it happens, the Magazine Mine is well suited to the Indiana bat, which Kath says has the narrowest temperature tolerance during hibernation of any Midwestern bat—about 39 to 46 degrees. If the temperature gets much warmer, he says, the bat’s metabolism speeds up and it may burn through its stored fat and starve; if colder, it succumbs to the chill or wastes energy searching for a warmer spot.
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Related topics: Bats Endangered Species Underground
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