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Fifteen species of bats in our state play an important role in our ecosystem and our economy, yet these unsung heroes are often feared and misunderstood. Join us as Jennifer Kindel, the Statewide Bat Biologist for SCDNR, demystifies these truly fascinating and beneficial flying mammals that call SC home.
About the Speaker:
Jennifer Kindel grew up on a farm in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and graduated with a MS in Wildlife Biology from Oregon State University working with Greater Sage-Grouse. For 10 years she contributed to various avian ecology projects around the US and in Western Australia. During her travels, Jen was amazed by the size of some of the world’s largest bats, the flying foxes, and inspired by the sight of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats filling the evening sky as they emerged from Carlsbad Caverns at sunset. When she moved to SC in 2012, she worked with wading birds, rusty blackbirds and other passerines before moving over to the bat world in 2016 and has enjoyed monitoring these fascinating mammals ever since.
As the state bat biologist, her main duties are to keep DNR’s Bat Program funded through grants, conduct hibernacula counts and WNS surveillance, survey bats in bridges and culverts, run Northern long-eared bat summer mist netting projects, provide WNS outreach, maintain the SC Bat Conservation and WNS Response Plans, run the SC citizen science program Bat Watch!, and help manage the North American Bat Monitoring (NABat) program in SC - a national effort to collect acoustic bat calls to monitor bats at various habitat scales over time to promote effective bat conservation and management.