Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge is offering this grant to conduct White Nose Syndrome surveillance and summer bat monitoring.

White nose syndrome surveillance and summer monitoring of bats at Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge determining presence of the disease and evidence of recovery during the maternity season.

Scope of the work The Field Crew Leader will have lead responsibility for implementing the bat research project at Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge May through August 2012. Duties will include overseeing the day to day field work of 4 interns; working cooperatively with a contractor on bat research, as needed; maintaining appropriate databases of information collected, and; preparing a report summarizing results of the research study. Great Swamp National Wildife Refuge is located in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

Work will include supervising crew of 4 interns while conducting field work; conducting passive and active acoustic surveys for bats following protocol developed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; conducting mist netting to capture 5 to 10 bats, all of which are cave dwelling bats, with the exception of Indiana bats; and fit the animals with radio transmitters. Please note that mist netting may be done in conjunction with a separate refuge-funded Indiana bat mist-netting effort on the Refuge being conducted by Environmental Innovations and Solutions; examining bats for presence of bands, banding all un-banded bats, and collecting basic biological data on study animals. Additionally, animals will be examined for wing damage and swab samples will be obtained to test for the presence of the WNS fungus. All equipment will be decontaminated using FWS protocols; Conducting radiotelemetry to locate and characterize daytime roost locations, and conducting emergence counts at roost trees to collect population data; maintaining appropriate databases on captured bats, swab samples, mist netting sites, telemetry locations, emergence counts, etc.; preparing a report detailing methods and summarizing results of bat captures, roost locations, emergence counts, and acoustic surveys; properly caring for all assigned vehicles and equipment.