[Bristol-Birds] if you find Beaver Creek and then lose it, don't be surprised

  • From: "Wallace Coffey" <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "Bristol-birds" <bristol-birds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2013 23:47:37 -0500

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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