Bats, man: Flying mammals detected over downtown Edmonton

Staff at the Royal Alberta Museum found that bats are flying over downtown Edmonton after they used a special detector for two months this spring.

Just because downtown Edmonton is more a concrete jungle than it is a lush forest doesn’t mean wildlife avoids it.

Including bats.

Staff at the Royal Alberta Museum installed an ultrasonic microphone on the roof of the building on 104 Avenue and 97 Street over two months earlier this year to detect bat calls and “make them visible to us, if not necessarily audible,” Nick Cairns, the museum’s curator of non-vertebrates, told CTV News Edmonton on Wednesday.

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Cairns said the project came about after staff at the museum wondered if bats were moving through the city.

“We know that there are bats in the city, but here, right in downtown, doesn’t necessarily seem conducive to lots of wildlife beyond jackrabbits and the coyote,” he said.

The result was 54 recordings of activity in April and May by two species: silver-haired bats and hoary bats. Cairns said they first detected bats over the museum on April 10, had “a good pulse of detections in late April, early May, and then another pulse in late May.”

“Those are both sort of larger migratory species that are probably moving through this area to get further north as they make their way to their birthing grounds and submarine areas,” he said.

Cairns said downtown still doesn’t meet the criteria bats typically need to best inhabit an area, “but it’s nice to know that we haven’t completely destroyed the ecosystem entirely. There are still animals moving through here.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Cameron Wiebe