Animals talk to each other, you know. If human jerks go around shooting wolves from helicopters, the birds know and some birds are chatty gossips (corvids!). The wild animals are watching humans and making mental notes about our behaviors. And some have even taken taken action. I’ve written about otter gang attacks, saboteur and attack squirrels, stoned coyotes, and grudge-holding skuas. Animals are not instinctive robots for humans to use or discard. They are more important than we are, actually. Earth would go along just fine without humans, but not without birds, bats, and other wild predators and prey.

The Daily Bucket is a place to note what you are seeing around you: animals, weather, meteorites, climate, soil, plants, waters. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the phenological patterns that are quietly unwinding around us. To have the Daily Bucket in your Activity Stream, visit Backyard Science’s profile page and click on Follow.

Sometimes it is the villains who make themselves known by being chatty gossips, like on Facebook. These idiots may have gotten off easily paying $250 fine and $70 in fees each by human law enforcement, but who knows what the bats have planned for them.

On March 16th, 2015, two hikers named Codey Foster and Dusten Ray Gill licked a tricolor bat in violation of federal law. The bat was hibernating in the Bowden Cave in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest, remote enough that if the hikers had kept their bat-licking escapade to themselves, no one might ever have discovered the crime. Unfortunately for the duo, they also spray-painted their names on the cave wall and uploaded evidence of the crime to Facebook.

The real problem for human law enforcement wasn’t the bat licking (which may be a regional specialty as I’ve never heard this was a rite-of-passage). The men/boys entered Bowden Cave, which is protected as a “significant cave” under the Federal Caves Resource Protection Act. 

Since 2006, a condition known as White Nose Syndrome has devastated bat populations in the northeast, infecting the creatures’ muzzle, ears, and wings as they hibernate. Affected areas see as many as 80 percent of bats fall to the disease, contributing to more than 6 million bat deaths in the decade since the disease was discovered. 

As a result, conservationists have gotten very serious about protecting bat caves. "The concern is if those same individuals visited another cave, and which cave, and where?" [...] "Even the smallest amount of soil could carry the spore."

Wildlife services recommend a full decontamination after leaving bat caves to prevent the spread of the disease, but many wilderness-goers ignore the recommendation and speed the spread of the deadly fungus.

 Although humans licking bats doesn’t spread white-nose, the disease itself was brought here by humans and has killed an estimated 6.7 million bats since 2006. It’s the worst wildlife disease outbreak in U.S. history and has killed entire caves of bats leaving their bones scattered on the cave floor.

The fungus appears to have been introduced to North America from Europe. It has been found on cave bats in 12 countries in Europe, as well as in China. The European and Chinese bats appear to be adapted to, and unaffected by, the fungus. Because bats do not migrate between North America and Europe or Asia, this strongly suggests the fungus was newly introduced to North America by people — likely cave visitors who transported it on their gear or clothing. This pattern is reminiscent of the spread of diseases that ravaged American Indian people when Europeans first colonized. White-nose syndrome was first discovered in North America in upstate New York in February 2006, in a cave adjoining a commercial cave visited by 200,000 people per year.

Since the wild ones are sharing the history of human’s actions to wild animals and their habitats, what kind of reputation do you wish? What if they hold you responsible for the actions of your ancestors? You can redeem yourself from this historic guilt by acting responsibly and not assuming you are the most important organism on earth.