Where are the Alaska bats right now?

Eileen Weatherby of Fairbanks once contacted me to inform that her cat carried in a surprise one September morning. Instead of the usual vole, her cat had captured a bat.

“I was startled because I thought bats in the Interior were pretty rare,” she wrote in an email message.

Eileen is right. Alaska bats are creatures at the far, frigid edge of their existence, but they do live in Alaska, in places with trees, perhaps as far north as

Fort Yukon. The palm-size creatures are now, in mid-October, avoiding below-freezing temperatures by either hibernating or migrating southward. Scientists aren’t quite sure which strategy far-north bats employ.

“I’ve had people tell me they know where bats hibernate in winter,” said Doreen Parker McNeill, who works at the Alaska Department of Fish & Game and who studied bats for her degree work at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Keith Price of Salcha once said he saw them hibernating in the utility corridors at Eielson Air Force Base,” she said.

Price was an interested bat-watcher who shared his fondness for bats with scientists. The longtime resident of Salcha for years stored his potatoes in a heated Quonset hut. Little brown bats, the only species of bat identified in interior Alaska, liked the hut so much that about 200 of them once lived in it, making the maternity bat colony there the farthest north in North America. Price invited scientists to visit his barn and study the