In August of 2022 the bats roosting in the roof of the Auditorium Annex building came to the attention of the powers that be. In an email communication about nesting animals on campus John Metras, Associate VP-Facilities, said they had “one recent report of bats roosting in a campus building. This was at the Auditorium Annex A last summer [2022].”
Georgia Stanley, SEEDs UBC, and campus liaison for a student project that was initiated upon discovery of the bats, said
“there was guano that was building up in some areas of the auditorium annex offices on the outside of the building. It looked like the bats were roosting in the spaces in the eaves of the roof. There's an outdoor walkways on the upper levels [of this building]. Guano was building up on some of the railings. So it was an important accessibility concern. So there were residents who noticed it and contacted some different folks on campus. That was in August [2022].”
Matt Mitchell, urban ecologist, who was involved as an advisor to the bat project, said:
“the staff that were discovering the bat feces and droppings, they needed to contact somebody. I ended up getting a phone call one day. Basically, like, ‘we think we have bats in our building. We heard you might be doing a bat project. Can you come by and have a look at it?’ That was how I got involved.”
Timothy Wong, student researcher, said:
“For extended periods of time [the guano has been] falling on the accessibility ramp and the handles there. Last summer there was guano accumulating on that. An issue that was raised was that no one's really responsible to clean up that kind of mess. So it fell onto custodial services, but they don't have the manpower to keep doing it continually. So they hired an external contractor to come clean it and to provide feedback. But it's quite costly and they would like a more permanent solution.”
Bats are ubiquitous in our region. In my conversation with Matt he noted:
“we have neighbours on the top floor [of the building I live in]. They’ve got rooftop patios and the bats like to go in the umbrellas. So they’ll find bats sitting in the umbrella in the mornings when they open them up.”
I have myself seen bats at dusk flying around the Old Barn Community Centre. At one point volunteers with the UNA CHildren’s Garden tried to set up a bat box but were flummoxed by the permitting process then required by UBC.
In summer 2020 a student in my film class did their project on bats in Vancouver’s Stanley park. Filmmaker Violetta Lapinski provides a viewer with a thorough account of a situation similar to problem UBC Building Facilities has been grappling with at the Auditorium Annex.
Knowledge Holders
I met three (quoted above) knowledge holders in preparation for this story: Georgia Stanley, Climate Response Applied Research Coordinator at SEEDS Sustainability Program; Matt Mitchell, UBC Urban Ecologist, and; Timothy Wong, student research participant (subsequently Nature Inclusive Coordinator at SEEDS Sustainability Program). I met them individually at the Old Barn Community Centre.
Georgia Stanley said her “current position is funded through the Climate Emergency Fund.” She has been in this position for about two years.
“I support student research projects, said Georgia, that are specifically focused on different aspects of the climate response connected to the climate emergency. This is pretty broadly focused on areas ranging from urban biodiversity to sustainable food systems to the connection between human and ecological health and well being. In SEEDs we're part of campus and community planning. So we work in the same unit as folks who are planners and policymakers and campus operations. So we create applied research projects that are interdisciplinary collaborations with UBC students and faculty that can help to inform UBC's sustainability commitments.”
Timothy Wong was a student in ENVR 400, a full year project driven capstone course. One of Timothy’s instructors, Dr. Tara Ivanochko, had provided an introduction.
“At the beginning of September,” Timothy said, “the professors of ENVR 400, so Tara and Michael pulled together a bunch of different projects from different community partners. Well, there was SEEDs sustainability hub who was doing the bat box, but there were also organizations from off campus, so the Little Mountain Neighbourhood House and from Mount Pleasant, City Studio and then the Stanley Park Ecological Society. The bat project was in my top three projects. I found it interesting because I never knew that bats were on campus before the presentation was pitched to me. From what they were telling us, it was like, you get to help potentially install a bat box. I thought that would be really cool and it'd be like a piece of ‘I did that’ when I graduated, ‘it can be like, oh, if I ever come back, I can go back to the bat box.’”
Matt Mitchell is an urban ecologist at the UBC Farm.
“During the pandemic,” Matt said, “I was doing biodiversity monitoring at the UBC farm. I've had some acoustic recorders out at the farm. We record audible sounds, the soundscape. But we also have an ultrasonic recorder.”
“A friend of mine who works for Environment and Climate Change Canada in the Canadian Wildlife Service, he and his partner were doing a project on bats and couldn't put their recorders out into the farms around Delta and around Vancouver [due to the pandemic]. So they they contacted me and said, ‘can we put them out at the farm to at least test them and that sort of thing.’ So I said, sure. They did that. And then after the pandemic, all of a sudden, Scott, he had funding through Environment Canada to do a bat project. So he said, do you want to do a bat project? I said, sure, I've never done bats, but sure, that sounds like fun. And so it started that way.”
The Problem
Once it was acknowledged that the bats couldn’t be forcibly moved, and that there was no budget to keep cleaning the guano, a student research project was initiated. UBC’s Building Operations in collaboration with SEEDs, aUBC unit devoted to applied climate action projects, helped set up a student research project.
Georgia and I spoke about the various things SEEDs does and then turned to the specific bat project.
“This project,” Georgia said, “was so interdisciplinary, we worked with folks from Custodial Services, people from Campus and Community Planning, and then also with advisors like Matt Mitchell.”
“The project was to help our UBC staff partners understand other habitats surrounding the existing bat roost that would be suitable for a possible bat box installation. So understanding that this is a sensitive species and there are certain times of the year they can't be disturbed. Everyone wanted to support the bat population. But really the project was about doing a habitat suitability analysis and looking into the process of installing a bat house and what would be the best practices in terms of kind of design and location, and then also making some recommendations for the policy realm and research realm around how to support bat populations on campus.”
The project itself was led by a group of students in ENVR 400. Timothy was the group’s primary spokesperson.
“It was pretty much my first immersion into bats,” Timothy said. “So for the first, I'd say a month or two, it was a lot of reviewing literature and just learning about their biology, their behaviours, their ecology, and just getting to know the species before we actually dove into what are we going to do about the bats that we found.”
The Solution
Doing research into the human/bat interface was one thing. Doing anything about it required a series of formal permitting applications once it was decided a bat box near the Auditorium Annex would be part of the solution.
Georgia said “supporting the students through the permitting process was really interesting. They did a GIS analysis of the surrounding area to understand which locations may be suitable for a bat box. Then they did some research into best practices for that kind of transition. They consulted with some on campus partners and some off campus partners, too, like the folks that helped to design the bat box and worked really closely with campus and community planning and then also with custodial services and also when it came to the permitting process, we were in conversations with UBC facilities related to kind of helping with the installation. So I think it was a complex process with lots of different stakeholders.
Matt Mitchell has been helping out by providing urban ecological context for the student researchers and others involved. Shortly before we met, Matt had led a bat watch at the Auditorium Annex Building where they did an emergence count:
“An emergence count,” Matt said, “is when you know there's a roost somewhere, you basically wait there and count from sunset to about an hour after sunset the number of bats that come out of the location.”
“It was really fun, actually,” Matt said. “We had 30, 30 plus people come out.”
“We met away from the building, talked about bats for a while, how we studied them, and then we walked over to the building. It's a little early in the year [April 2023], but we just sat there and we had like 25, 30 bats come out. … Last year when we did the study, the survey, we had 120 bats. And so it varies. During the year they move around.”
When I spoke with Timothy I asked him why they can’t just seal the roof so the bats can’t get in. He explained that they could in theory, if they know there are no bats actively using the roost in the roof.
“You’re allowed to do that because that’s not technically causing them harm. As long as there’s no bats there. There is a period of time every year from pretty much when they emerge from hibernation up until when the pups, the bat babies, learn to fly, that you can’t block off the exits because if they’re stuck in there they’ll die and then you can’t have that.
“Has anyone actually looked inside where they’ve nested with cameras or in an attic to see if they can see them up there or not,” I asked.
“They’ve tried,” Timothy said, “but the way the building is laid out, it’s the same roofing all around the building so they could be like virtually all around the building. So it’s not like just one area.”
The solution that people arrived at was to build and install a bat house and hope the bats find the free standing bat house more to their liking than the roof of the Auditorium Annex.
Timothy explained some of the process involved in getting everything approved to install a bat house near the Auditorium Annex. One of the biggest problem’s they faced was that a lot of the space that might be appropriate bat house habitat is reserved for future construction projects.
“It was much more complicated than my group members thought it would be. There are a lot of things that we had to find out along the way. Especially as we were trying to get the permit for the bat box. There were a lot of things that we didn't realize we had to check. For example, consulting with the arborist. It was a lot of back and forth between like, ‘we think this location would be good,’ but apparently it's slated for development and then it's like back and forth. ‘How about this location?’ ‘No, there's pipes.’ So we have to contact a lot of different people. I think one thing that really stuck out is right now, the bat project, the bats themselves, it's no one's priority, really. It's kind of just being well, the students were doing it, but the students weren't doing it full time. So it was a really slow and incremental process to get all the steps that we needed. It was waiting for responses, checking up different things and finding new locations if old locations didn't work.”
“It was like a lot of what we had to do was find people who knew information because there's no database to check that. Oftentimes you're like emailing one person, they're like, you should email this other person.”
“At times it was definitely a little more frustrating, especially when it came to choosing the location. First of all the location for the bats themselves. You have to make sure there's enough sun. You have to make sure there's surrounding space, a 20 foot radius around the box just to make sure they don't fly into things when they leave the box. Other requirements related to bats, like what habitat they would actually take to. So we had to balance that with things like, ‘oh, you can't install it there,’ or like this place would be suitable, ‘but it's better for development.’ There was a whole thing that we had to make the bat box removable just in case they needed to remove it for construction in the future. So we were scrambling and trying to find a location that might not be developed so we could do more permanent installation because it would also be a lot easier for us to do a permanent installation.”
“Because we were operating under the assumption that it needed to be removable for a long time, it also drove up our material costs and it also made the installation plan more difficult. So there was a lot of that in the background. I totally get that we're just asking people on top of what they're already doing, but because it was such a slow process, by the end of it nearing April, it was just like it felt like a little bit of a letdown.”
“At the beginning our student group wanted to install the bat box. I'm not saying it's anyone's fault, because there are reasons why specific things have to be checked and policies are in place. But it didn't change the fact it was a little anticlimactic and all we had to show for it was our final report. We had recommendations and suggestions and things that we took away from the project.”
Almost three months after Timothy and I spoke the bat house was finally installed by UBC staff at the Old Auditorium a few meters away from the troublesome bat roost.
Will it work?
Will it work? I asked Matt if he thought the bats would depart the Auditorium Annex to take up home in the new bat house.
“We know the saga with the eagles’ nest,” I said, “and the artificial nest has been a complete and utter bust. How does that port into the issues about putting up bat boxes beside a bat roost and stuff?”
“This is one of the biggest challenges of putting in those bat boxes,” Matt said. “How do you get the bats to use them? There's no real good sense of how to make them successful or not. Sometimes people have smeared bat guano on them and that sometimes helps, but sometimes not. There's been places where they've put up boxes and they seem to be the same as another place and they get used and the other ones don't. It maybe will have to do with how many other roost locations the bats already have. Basically what usually happens is you exclude the bats at a time of the year when they're not using the roost. Like in the winter, usually you'll seal it up and then when they come back the next year, they won't really use it. So really similar to the eagle nest.”
“That building looks pretty old and porous,” I said. Is it really possible to actually seal it up tight?”
“I think it's going to be really challenging as well,” Matt said. “Like talking with the bat experts that I know they're like, it's pretty tough and it's usually way more expensive and time consuming to do this than people assume. They think it's, oh, you just cover it up and it's going to be easy. But it’s not.”
“One of the things it seems the facilities people are worried about, just like people interacting with the feces and human health risks. There's some small human health risks from that. It's not rabies, but another virus that I don't think there's any cases in BC.”
“But isn't it a very low risk,” I said?
“Very low, very highly unlikely. They seem to really have this, I think people just don't like the idea of animals in buildings. So the idea is ‘let's exclude them.’ In some ways a better solution might be to put up trays to catch the guano and that sort of thing, let the bats do their thing, but then prevent the guano from falling to where it's going to interact with people.”
One new bat box, combined with an extensive winter time sealing of all the holes and cracks along the roof of the Auditorium Annex, might lead to the shifting of the bats. Or, it might just add a another local roost for the bats. Or, like the bat houses behind the Beaty Biodiversity Building, it might just sit empty for several years.
One solution Matt and I spoke of (which UBC has not considered) was to think about (and implement) building design that supports animal habitat in ways complimentary to positive human/animal interactions. UBC has made some small effort with bird strike prevention design in the massive skyscrapers they are building, but for the most part complimentary human/animal building design is not yet on the planning table. With the Official Campus Land Use Plan under revision it could be a good time to include animal friendly building design in the plan.
Thank you for writing about the campus bats! What could have been a win-win collaboration between UBC and ENVR students was hampered by rigidity, bureaucracy, and the university's usual unwillingness to consider animals' POV, despite the good intentions of its Indigenous Strategic Plan. Future development is prioritized over the well-being of an indigenous animal population making its home in a campus building on stolen land, where bats have been living for millennia. I'm glad the bat box finally was installed, but I'm not super-optimistic about it being the solution to the problem. I agree that building design that incorporates animal habitat in a way that keeps both animals and humans safe should be a priority for future development.