If Beaver Creek in downtown Bristol seems curious, you are correct. It flows for one-half mile under Piedmont Ave. from Moore St. in Bristol Virginia, crossing under State Street and a business in Bristol Tennessee where it flows out of the channel behind Boy's Bicycle. It is virtually a manmade cave. It functions as a major nursery for a large population of endangered Gray Bats. Last May, Federal wildlife officials announced they had found, for the first time, a deadly fungal infection in Gray Bats. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the Gray Bats in Hawkins County, TN were found infected with white-nose syndrome. The infection has decimated bat colonies in 19 states. Kevin Hamed and his students at Virginia Highlands Community College, have helped band large numbers of bats from the Bristol Virginia-Tennessee summer nursery under the Bristol channel. About 50 bats or more are known to travel between a Hawkins Co. hibernacula and the Bristol Virginia nursery Gray bats are particularly vulnerable to the fungus because they live in large colonies in relatively few caves. The first discovery of the downtown Bristol colony under Piedmont Ave. by a naturalist or biologist came on July 9, 1974 when a Bristol Virginia Utilities Board employee took me wading thru the channel to look at utilities in the tunnel. It was then that we found thousands of bats in the nursery, clinging to the ceilings everywhere. Hundreds were swirling all about us. The colony was thought to break up about the first of July. I wrote and published an article with photos in the Bristol Herald Courier on July 11, 1974 and it was also published in the Bristol Virginia-Tennessean, a now defunct afternoon newspaper. While I was able to take a couple of groups on a wading field trip thru the tunnel, the last such trip was in the mid-1990s. We never knew the exact species of bats using the colony. That came maybe 10 years later or a little less when Kevin Hamed stirred interest among state biologists while Hamed was the chief park naturalist at Steele Creek Park Nature Center. Hamed was able to acquire technology which did remote sensing of the voices of the bats as they came out of the channel at night to feed above the city. That technology was used to determine both the species composition and population numbers of the tunnel bat population. Wallace Coffey Bristol, TN
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