Bat Identifications

Congratulations students! We have completed our bat species identifications. We seem to have (2) Big Brown Bats, Eptesicus fuscus and (1) Red Bat, Lasiurus borealis. Both species are within the family Vespertilionidae commonly found in our region. The bats will now be permanently maintained in our natural history collection for study by future classes.

The emphases in this exercise were on observation, measurement, and classification. We used measuring instruments including metric rulers and calipers. We used hand lenses, binocular dissecting microscopes, and digital cameras to collect our observations. Measurements were entered into an Excel spreadsheet and averaged across classes.