Bats draw attention of miners

Todd Welty wasn't thinking of protecting bats when he set out to find a wildlife-preservation project in the neighborhood of the Florida Mine south of Winnemucca.

But his company's work to protect the nation's largest maternity colony of pallid bats is emblematic of an ever-growing awareness in the mining industry of its need to be aware of bats and their needs.

Bats and mining? Think of an old mines as essentially a man-made cave and you'll get the picture in a hurry.

Planning for new mining project in Nevada increasingly takes the needs of bat populations into consideration.

Russ Fields, president of the Nevada Mining Association, explained last week that minerals companies often begin their search for new resources in areas where old miners were successful.

"You look for elephants in elephant country," he said, quoting an old industry maxim.

Mountainsides filled with old mines, however, also are likely to have attracted bat colonies colonies whose needs will need to be addressed if a mining company hopes to win an environmental permit for a new operation.

Even when modern-day mining companies seek to do a good deed by sealing up old mine shafts to protect the public, they need to be careful that they don't harm bat colonies in the process.

"Before we do that, we have a bat biologist review the site and see if there are any bat habitat," Fields said.

For Welty, bats were about the farthest thing from his mind when he set out to find a wildlife-preservation project that could be undertaken by Florida Mining Inc., the Apollo Gold unit that operates the Florida Mine.

Welty, environmental manager at the mine, was looking for a communityservice project involving big animals deer, maybe when the Bureau of Land Management convinced him to consider protection of the pallid bat colony.

The maternal colony a group of bat mothers nursing their one or two pups a year lives in a long-abandoned mine adit in Pershing County.

It's not part of the Apollo Gold holdings.

Jennifer Jeffers, a Fallon-based nongame biologist with the Nevada Division of Wildlife, also was eager to see protection of the maternal colony's habitat.

The division of wildlife, she said, works to protect all 23 species of bats in the state.

Pallid bats play an important role in Nevada's ecology as they forage large insects such as beetles, Mormon crickets, grasshoppers, scorpions and centipedes.

To protect the colony, the mine, the state division of wildlife, BLM and a nonprofit, Bat Conservation International, bought a bat gate especially made by Frontier Environmental Solutions Inc.

of Ridgecrest, Calif.

While most bat gates are made of metal culvert, bat experts worried that metal might distort the navigational "pings" the bats use as a form of sonar.

Instead, they installed a concrete culvert.

The bat gate large enough to allow bats' passage, small enough to prevent human entrance is located midway through the culvert.

To protect the tiny mammals, the exact location of the old mine is being kept secret.