Summer 2006
Southern comfort
Riki Burkhardt’s article “Crisis? What crisis?” [Last Word, Spring 2006, page 46] highlights the economic circumstances that are faced by many people in northern Ontario, including First Nation communities. Her statistics and text provide a brief glimpse of the challenges we face in the North. Based on forecasts, economic conditions will become more demanding and disheartening. Northerners are envious of the South’s prosperity. We marvel at your unconstrained consumptive behaviour, your pollution, your traffic gridlock and your garbage piles. Interestingly, a major source of the material that fuels your consumption originates in the forests and mines of northern Ontario.
For communities in the North to prosper, a land base along with associated raw materials is required to provide for a mix of economic, social and cultural activities. Forestry and mining can continue to be a source of economic well-being for northerners. In fact, our forestry and mining activities are among the most sustainable and environmentally acceptable in the world. The fact that many forests in northeastern Ontario have acquired Forest Stewardship Council Certification as an independent assessment of forest practices is supported by Ontario Nature.
Increasingly, materials from the developing world like China and Russia have occupied the marketplace by virtue of their low prices. Purchasers in southern Ontario clamour for these products in spite of the fact that there are few to no environmental controls in these countries and labour standards are non-existent. So, in the end the market may displace all raw material production in the North, and a silent landscape that is proposed by Burkhardt may be the result. Although protected areas are an integral component of sustainably managed forests, these areas do not contribute economically to local communities.
James Miller, Sault Ste. Marie
Logging near the nests
Riki Burkhardt’s article “Logging caribou territory”[Earthwatch, Spring 2006, page 8] gives readers the mistaken impression that nests of eagles, herons and ospreys in the St. Raphael Signature Site are threatened by proposed logging. During timber harvesting operations, all known nests of these species are protected by Area of Concern (AOC) prescriptions, including reserves and timing restrictions. The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR) develops science-based prescriptions for sensitive species and works very hard to test their effectiveness. An excellent example is an OMNR project in 2001 that evaluated effectiveness of routine prescriptions using 150 osprey nests and 150 heron colonies in the largest study of its kind in North America. It showed that the AOCs used since the early 1980s have been effective and, in fact, much more conservative than necessary to protect these nesting birds. Also noteworthy is MNR’s recent proposal to downlist the status of eagles in northern Ontario from “endangered” to “special concern.” This will not change the AOCs that have been applied effectively around their nests since 1987.
Kandyd Szuba, Biologist, Domtar Inc.
Teamwork
Congratulations on your recent anniversary issue [Winter 2005/06] celebrating Ontario Nature’s 75th birthday. We read with interest “The trailblazers” [page 18], which highlights the role played by the Brodie Club in the founding of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists (FON). We were disappointed, however, that you chose to focus anniversary coverage on a single group when so many other groups and individuals also played major roles in the birth of FON. By 1931, individual naturalists, as well as clubs in Ottawa, London, Hamilton, Toronto (several groups) and smaller centres, were already starting to coordinate some of their activities to further their conservation goals. W. E.
Saunders, the London businessman (not a dentist) who became the first president of FON, was the most respected and loved naturalist in the province. In this anniversary year, we recognize, salute and thank all the founders of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists.
Katherine Turner, President, McIlwraith Field Naturalists of London
The fall of the wild
By Shannon Wilmot
Many conservation groups, including Ontario Nature, are frustrated by the continued absence of a comprehensive provincial policy outlining permissible development in the northern stretch of the boreal forest.
Some protection sometimes
By Riki Burkhardt
Oceans and bodies of fresh water represent the vast majority of the earth’s surface yet little has been done in this province to identify and protect marine areas. The north shore of Lake Superior is one of the most magnificent and ecologically intact stretches of Great Lakes coastal landscape remaining in Ontario. In recognition of this, the federal and provincial governments announced last November the signing of an agreement in principle to create a National Marine Conservation Area (NMCA) in the northwestern part of Lake Superior. The agreement is part of an ambitious project to create 29 areas that formally recognize distinct marine ecosystems across Canada. Other NMCAs have also been identified—such as Gwaii Haanas, which lies off the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia, and Fathom Five National Marine Park in Ontario’s Georgian Bay.
Learning curve ahead
By Christine Beevis
Last November, environmental educators who had deplored the removal of environmental science from the Ontario curriculum in grades seven through 12 in the mid- 1990s cheered when the Ministry of Education announced that it would submit itself to the Environmental Bill of Rights (EBR). In this way, the ministry would increase its accountability to the public for its environmentally significant decisions.
Quarry wins the day
By Christine Beevis
A decades long tug-of-war over one of the most significant natural sites in Ottawa may have finally ended in favour of quarry activity. Last summer, a vote by Ottawa City Council gave the green light to R.W. Tomlinson Ltd. to expand its quarry into the adjacent 80-hectare area known as 5309 Bank Street. In 2003, the city designated 70 hectares of the Bank Street site as “surplus land” and sold it to R.W. Tomlinson, despite widespread opposition. However, the conditions of sale stipulated that the company was not to alter the land until the required zoning change, from agricultural general to resource extraction, was approved. R.W. Tomlinson’s application to amend the zoning was recently approved in an 11 to seven vote by the city council.
Bands ask for mining moratorium
By Julee Boan
Eight First Nations bands are calling for an end to the Province’s “free-entry” mineral exploration and development system. Chiefs and representatives from Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (Big Trout Lake), Muskrat Dam, Wapekeka, Wawakapewin, Wunnumin, Kingfisher Lake, Sachigo and Bearskin First Nations have declared a moratorium on mining exploration within their traditional territories. The bands argue that Ontario’s Aboriginal people never intended to give up ownership of their land through treaties with the British Crown, and they are seeking a new relationship with government and industry. A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision has strengthened their argument. In the case of a proposed road through Wood Buffalo National Park, the court said that before making any decision that would affect treaty rights to hunt and trap on Crown land, First Nations must be consulted and their interests accommodated.
Simcoe and the developers
By Linda Pim
South Simcoe has become a development hotspot in recent years, and the focus of many proposals for urban expansion that leapfrog over the Oak Ridges Moraine, which is part of the protected Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt (see “Stop the sprawl in Simcoe,” Autumn 2005). Simcoe lies just outside of the Greenbelt.
Trading spaces
By Julee Boan
Created in 1999, Ontario’s Living Legacy was a provincial program that culminated in the designation of 378 new parks and conservation reserves throughout the province. While negotiating the final boundaries for candidate areas, conservation groups and Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) staff discovered that numerous mining claims had been staked in some of those areas prior to the proposal of their candidacy for protection. MNR agreed that the overlap needed to be resolved without a net loss to the overall amount of land protected.
Smog daze
A growing body of research is shedding light on a dirty issue: the connection between poor air quality and a litany of respiratory health problems. Who is most at risk? Children
By Sarah Scott
During the first week of October 2005, at the end of a record-breaking summer of smog alerts in Ontario, an invisible cloud of ozone gas drifted over the little village of Scotland, Ontario, 100 kilometres southwest of Toronto. You could not see it or smell it. Mary Dinner, for one, didn’t even know it had arrived. She had moved with her husband and two daughters a few years earlier to the quiet farming village amid fields of corn, tobacco and beans. In that first week of October, life seemed tranquil as usual. The sun was shining, and the weather was hot and humid — a final burst of summer. It seemed like a fine time for Mary’s 13-year-old daughter, Katie, to try out for the school soccer team. Katie, a slight, blond-haired Grade 8 student, loved athletics — especially cheerleading and track — and rarely let her asthma get in the way.
So Katie went off, eager to try out for the team. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, Mary received a frightening phone call from the school. Katie was on the field, gasping for air, as if she were breathing through a straw after a sprint. By the time Mary rushed to school with the puffer her daughter had forgotten at home, she suspected what the problem was: the fumes in the air. Excessive air pollution, Mary remembered, always triggered breathing difficulty for Katie.
“You’d think it would be better in the country,” Mary said later. Most people would agree, but on many days, ozone levels are higher in villages like Scotland (population about 600) than in downtown Toronto. Ground-level ozone is created when fumes from coal plants, vehicles and industry mingle in the sun, and it can aggravate asthma, provoke asthma attacks and send asthmatic children to the hospital. There is no escaping it: dirty air rides in with the winds from the coal-fired plants of the Ohio Valley to pollute the air outside your home and school and jeopardize your children’s health.
Katie’s story is just one example of how pollution is harming children’s health in Ontario and around the world. A growing body of research reveals that air pollution, ozone in particular, exacerbates respiratory illnesses like bronchitis, impairs lung function, stunts lung growth and increases the risk of infant death. According to new research from California, high ozone levels may even be causing asthma. While it is too early to say for sure, the new study points to the very real possibility that air pollution is at least partly to blame for a four-fold increase between 1978 and 1996 in the number of Canadian children diagnosed with asthma. (As of 1997, 12 percent of Canadian kids under 20 suffered from asthma.)
So much illness has a price tag. The Ontario Medical Association reports that in 2005, smog sent 1,430 children with respiratory ailments to an Ontario hospital bed, and another 3,858 young people with respiratory problems to the emergency room. That represents a significant chunk of the overall cost of smog in Ontario: an astounding $7.8 billion due to premature deaths, hospital admissions, emergency room visits and school absenteeism.
The heavy toll air pollution takes on the health of Ontarians, and in particular on children, has prompted Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government to order that the province’s four remaining coal-fired power plants, which supply 21.4 percent of Ontario’s electricity, be shut down by 2009. Coal-fired power plants, along with the metal smelting industry, are the two biggest sources of made-in-Ontario smog, according to Ontario’s Ministry of Environment. Yet this promise may be a hard one for the government to keep, since it is not clear how Ontario will replace the coal-generated 6,400 megawatts of relatively cheap electricity. Until alternative sources of energy are found, McGuinty’s government has indicated that it won’t shut down the coal plants. Environmentalists are, of course, still expecting the province to keep its promise, but coal is only part of the problem. Now a broad coalition of environmentalists and physicians is saying that government ought to do much more to reduce or even eliminate the damage that dirty air inflicts on children.
The impact of pollution in the air, water, food, soil and even consumer goods on the health of humans, especially children, is a new and challenging field of research. Children are far more vulnerable to the effects of pollution than are adults. A primer published last fall by the Canadian Partnership for Children’s Health and Environment — a coalition of 11 health and environmental organizations that includes Toronto Public Health, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, the Ontario College of Family Physicians, Pollution Probe, and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment — explains why: “Kilogram for kilogram of body weight, [children] eat more food, drink more water and breathe more air than will an adult.” Children play closer to the ground where dust settles. They have a longer life ahead to suffer the ill effects of pollution. Children’s vulnerabilities can be more subtle still. Infant skin, for example, is more permeable than is the skin of an adult. A baby’s lungs are not fully developed at birth; growing respiratory systems can become overburdened by toxic substances. The immune and digestive systems, as well as the liver and kidneys, are not fully developed at birth either. Some children are simply more at risk than others, either because of their genetic makeup or their socio-economic condition. Children who are poor are more likely to be exposed to health risks from roadways, industrial facilities and hazardous waste dumps than are their wealthier counterparts, the report notes. Children in the poor neighbourhoods of Toronto, for instance, are almost twice as likely to go to hospital for respiratory problems as kids living in the richest areas, according to Toronto Public Health.
Wild Child Guide
Your complete guide to conservation with kids
By Lisa Keller
The lazy, hazy days of summer are the perfect time to immerse your family in nature. The weather’s fine, school’s out and the great outdoors is the optimal playground.
Formal lessons may be finished for now, but that doesn’t mean your child has stopped learning. Summer holidays can be the ideal opportunity to teach children about conservation. There are countless ways to do so, all involving a high degree of fun, which, as every parent knows, eases the learning process.
Below is a comprehensive list of what you can do for and with your kids during the hot season. Be it bugs, plants, archaeology, critters or stunning vistas you seek, Ontario has it all. Teaching your kids to love and conserve their world means it will all still be here for their children to experience.
(* means highly recommended)
PETERBOROUGH
Learn about all creatures great and small at the Riverview Park and Zoo (705-748-9301, ext. 2304), just north of downtown Peterborough. Meet the keeper at 1 p.m. throughout July and August. The zoo also houses the Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre (www.kawarthaturtle.org, 705-748-9301, ext. 2303), a unique facility that tends to injured turtles and is involved in fighting their decline.
* CAMP KAWARTHA (www.campkawartha.ca, 705-652-3860 or 1-866-532-4597) operates as an environmental education centre for 10 months of the year and, since 1921, has fostered environmental awareness in young campers during the other two months. The camp is on Clear Lake, 26 kilometres north of Peterborough.
Camp Kawartha offers numerous co-ed camping programs, all of which involve nature-based and outdoor education, including on-site teaching of sustainable living practices. A straw-bale solar-powered greenhouse, wind turbines and solar panels are part of the facilities. Sessions range from one-week day camps for children age 5 to 8, to two-week wilderness canoe trips for campers age 14 to 16. Four-day nature camps for kids age 7 to 14 are run in conjunction with Ontario Nature.
TORONTO
* THE TORONTO ZOO (www.torontozoo.com, 416-392-5900) is a great place to start your wildlife observations. The zoo’s Adopt-A-Pond Wetland Conservation Programme (www.torontozoo.com/adoptapond) provides teachers, students and community groups with information, resources and educational opportunities to conserve, restore and even create wetland habitats. You and your children can also take part in the Ontario Turtle Tally by noting turtle sightings and reporting them by entering your observations into the on-line database, the purpose of which is to record information on Ontario turtles, including species at risk. Adopt-A-Pond is also the provincial coordinator of Environment Canada’s Frogwatch program, which strives to help save amphibians in Ontario. The program will teach you to identify frogs visually and by their calls.To receive a Frogwatch-Ontario package, e-mail aap@TorontoZoo.ca, call 416-392-5999 or visit the Frogwatch-Ontario website (www.torontozoo.com/adoptapond/FrogwatchOntario.asp).
THE TASK FORCE TO BRING BACK THE DON (www.toronto.ca/don/index.htm) is a citizens’ group sponsored by the City of Toronto that is working to create a clean, green and accessible Don River watershed. You and your kids can participate in a wide variety of related volunteer activities, including the community stewardship program, which divides volunteers into teams that remove invasive non-native plant species, collect litter, maintain bird boxes, build habitat brush bundles and monitor site conditions. The city also has family tree planting days, for which it provides everything you need, including gloves and shovels.
THE TORONTO BAY INITIATIVE (www.torontobay.net, 416-598-2277), a nonprofit organization dedicated to a cleaner, greener Toronto, organizes boat tours, family fishing days and other events. Restoration work, tree planting and weeding are just a few of the volunteer activities available. The website includes an on-line volunteer form.
THE CITY OF TORONTO (www.toronto.ca/parks/index.htm, 416-338-0338) has a website well worth exploring. It has links to summer camps and camping facilities in the GTA, environmental programs for children, cycling maps and discovery walks, information about the tree advocacy planting program and a guide to Riverdale Farm, found in the heart of the city and open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Visitors can talk to the farmer during daily feedings and kids can become junior farmers. Call 416-961-8787 for information or to volunteer with The Friends of Riverdale Farm.
* THE TORONTO AND REGION CONSERVATION AUTHORITY (TRCA) (www.trca.on.ca, 416-661-6600) runs the Boyd Archaeological Field School for Ontario high school students — pricey at $895, but fascinating. Now in its 30th year, the program takes place from August 7 to 26 at the Claremont Conservation Field Centre. The course includes an introduction to archaeological theory, archaeological excavation, fieldwork, analysis of artefacts, the study of prehistoric Aboriginal cultures, experience in Aboriginal uses of the environment, flintknapping and other lost skills. Students excavate an archaeological site in the east end of the Greater Toronto Area.
The TRCA also runs an exhaustive program of educational activities and learning opportunities for students during the school year, and provides a green list of places to visit in the GTA, along with summer activities relating to the outdoors and the environment.
OTTAWA
THE CITY OF OTTAWA (www.ottawa.ca, 613-580-2782) runs a family-oriented Adopt-a-Park program that focuses on park and roadway conservation. The minimum commitment is road and parkway cleaning twice a year, but volunteers are encouraged to do as much as they wish and can participate in tree plantings, the restoration of park furniture, and inspection and reporting of park vandalism.
THE CANADIAN MUSEUM OF NATURE (www.nature.ca, 613-566-4700 or 1-800-263-4433) includes on its website a calendar of activities and visitor information, and lists details of fun, hands-on programs for tots to learn about nature. As well, the scientists at the museum and their partners have completed the Rideau River Biodiversity Project. Its website (www.nature.ca/rideau/index-e.html) has detailed descriptions of conservation activities that you can undertake, either on your own or as part of a community group, all in the name of helping the river.
Blood work
For years, environmentalists tried to persuade the EPA to ban a suspected carcinogen found in the bloodstreams of nearly every creature on the planet. Then Scott Mabury made a groundbreaking discovery
By Sharon Oosthoek
As the light fades on this late winter afternoon, Scott Mabury stands at the whiteboard in his University of Toronto office drawing complicated-looking chemical formulas. A large man with a full beard and plaid shirt, he looks like he would be more comfortable paddling a canoe on a quiet northern Ontario lake.
But Mabury is best known in scientific circles as the environmental chemist who solved the mystery of how a newly recognized and potentially toxic substance is finding its way into nearly everyone’s bloodstream. Mabury, who holds a PhD in environmental chemistry, loves a mystery and has been trying to solve this particular one for the past seven years, ever since scientists first began systematically measuring for — and discovering — perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in human and animal blood.
In 1976, a University of Rochester researcher unexpectedly discovered an organic fluorine in his blood while researching water fluoridation. But he could not identify the chemical beyond that. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that scientists were able to identify the fluorine-based chemicals in our bloodstreams.
When PFOA was discovered, researchers were baffled by its widespread presence. Even more unexpected was its appearance in the blood of Arctic animals, including Canadian polar bears, living far from the manufacturing plants that produce PFOA. Mabury and his team of researchers — the Mabury Group — have discovered that common consumer products such as microwave popcorn bags and stain-resistant carpets are the most likely source of the PFOA circulating through our bodies. More specifically, these products are treated with stain- and water-resistant chemicals that, over time, break down and release fluorinated alcohols, which in turn degrade into PFOA.
Although PFOA cannot travel long distances, its precursor, fluorinated alcohol, can. The latter can remain in the atmosphere for up to 20 days, enough time to travel as far away as the Arctic before breaking down into PFOA. “Our major contribution is understanding the transport and degradation process,” says Mabury, who has been studying fluorinated chemicals since 1998.
PFOA, sometimes called “C8” because of its eight carbon atoms, is a manufactured chemical that does not occur naturally in the environment. It is a member of a class of chemicals known as fluorinated chemicals that not only bio-accumulate in our bodies, but also retain their molecular arrangement for a very, very long time.
“These chemicals redefine persistence as we know it,” says Mabury. “Chemicals known as ‘persistent toxic chemicals’ do degrade eventually. But these chemicals have never been shown to degrade under any environmentally relevant conditions.” In the United States, science advisers to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended in February that the agency classify PFOA as a “likely” human carcinogen. While the agency prepares a final risk assessment for PFOA, its scientists examine studies that indicate the chemical causes liver tumours in rats and immune problems in mice.
Especially alarming is the possibility that the way we are exposed to PFOA may put children at particular risk.
Fertile Grounds
By Bruce Gillespie
A new crop of unique school programs allow students to both learn about the environment and save it too
One of the first things you see upon entering the main doors of Scarborough’s Dr. Norman Bethune Collegiate Institute is the student-run recycling station. Just off to one side of the school’s massive commons area, the recycling station is where the 70-plus members of the Bethune Environmental Action Team (BEAT) sort through a wide range of detritus dropped off by staff and students.They collect everything from wine corks, which are donated to local Girl Guides for craft projects, to spent printer cartridges, which are returned to the manufacturer for a rebate (last year’s rebates totalled about $300). Down the hall and around the corner is a staff photocopy room, another place BEAT members spend a lot of their time before and after classes, sorting single-sided sheets of paper, which can be reused, from double-sided sheets that are ready for recycling. A notice on the wall reminds staff that only paper that is crumpled or contains staples, or confidential documents such as student information (and love notes, the students point out with a snicker), should go in the garbage. Everything else can be used again, one way or another.
The next stop on the tour of BEAT projects is the cafeteria, which bustles at lunchtime. In an effort to encourage more students to recycle their empty pop cans, the team replaced the large, blue bins that were rarely used with smaller, putty-coloured garbage cans, the kind normally seen at the end of driveways on garbage day. The only difference is that these garbage containers have holes the size of dinner plates cut into their lids so students can drop their cans in easily, without lifting a sticky lid or inhaling the fumes that come from within. “It was so smelly,” explains Grade 12 student Christina Lee-Chan.
It is an ingenious, if simple, solution, and one that only young people would think of. What’s more, it works, and the students have bags of recyclables they collect every day to prove it. This type of change and others like it have made the school a model for environmentalism in action and earned it a gold certification from the EcoSchools program of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). Now in its third year of certifying schools, the program is one of many new models popping up across the province that are designed to reduce soaring energy bills while helping kids become ecologically literate — a concept that not only includes teaching how nature works, but also the idea that everything on our planet is interconnected and that the choices we make, whether personal or societal, can affect the water, soil and air on which we depend.
It should come as no surprise that this push is a reaction to government cutbacks and rising energy costs. For most boards with programs similar to the TDSB’s, the impetus was saving money. The Upper Grand District School Board’s Energy W.I.S.E. program emerged from a retrofit project to reduce energy consumption at the board’s 71 schools three years ago. After working with a private company to upgrade the heating, lighting and water systems in its buildings to make them operate more efficiently, the board shifted its focus to changing how staff and students use the buildings. “The energy costs are more than $1 million for our board for one year, and it’s expected you can get five to 10 percent savings on that from behavioural changes, like if kids shut off the lights when they leave a room, shut off their computer monitors, that kind of thing,” explains Gregg Reekie, who is in charge of the board’s outdoor education program and chaired the Energy W.I.S.E. steering committee.“So, we wanted to address the behavioural component and get the schools and students involved in energy saving.”
A program in place at both the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and the Hastings and Prince Edward District School Board works the same way. Rose-Marie Batley, a retired superintendent with the Ottawa-Carleton board and now the executive director of EarthCARE, an organization that works with school boards to reduce their energy and waste costs, says as much as 10 percent of a school’s total utility costs is wasted through the behaviour of its occupants. “Five or six years ago when we started out, it was not uncommon for schools to leave 75 percent of their lights and computers on when they weren’t needed, overnight or even over the summer,” says Batley.
So one of EarthCARE’s main projects is Lights Off,Computer Off (LOCO), in which students conduct energy audits of their schools to see how many lights and computers are left on in rooms no one is using and whether blinds and drapes are closed after school hours to help retain heat. Under the guidance of a dedicated EarthCARE project manager, school teams work to reduce energy consumption by placing stickers on light switches and computers, reminding people to turn them off, and conducting spot checks. In 2003/04, the first year of the LOCO program, the Ottawa-Carleton board saved an estimated $938,700. In 2004/05, with 98.7 percent of its 149 schools taking part, the savings amounted to $1.08 million.
Ontario’s bats
By Dan Schneider and Peter Pautler
As the only flying mammals in the world, bats can make an impressive claim to fame. Eight species of these nocturnal creatures live in Ontario. Agile and predatory, bats are capable of extremely sophisticated bio-sonar, also called echolocation, meaning that they emit pulses of sound and can detect echoes bouncing back from objects, including their prey. Human beings are incapable of hearing the ultrasonic pulses bats emit. The sounds insect-eating bats make range in frequency from about 20,000 hertz (Hz, or cycles per second) to about 60,000 Hz. Our limit of hearing is about 20,000 Hz. (Human voices range from 100 Hz to 1,700 Hz, while a piano’s upper limit is 3,600 Hz.)
A bat’s keen sense of hearing allows it to detect returning echoes from nearby prey, and its remarkable agility allows it to then react and capture flying insects. A bat can execute a change of direction in as little as one-sixteenth of a second. Because they usually detect insects that are within a few metres, bats appear to be flying erratically as they rapidly change direction to capture prey. A red bat can emit a sound five times per second; when the bat is closing in for the kill, the rate increases to an amazing 200 times per second. Sometimes bats capture insects with their mouth, but a bat can also use its tail or wings to scoop up an insect and transfer it to its mouth “acrobatically” while in flight.
As insectivores, Ontario’s bats are beneficial to humans. A lactating little brown bat needs to consume her full body weight in insects every night (twice her normal consumption), equivalent to some 5,000 mosquitoes. One examination of the stomach contents of a little brown bat revealed as many as 145 mosquitoes.
If their prey seems small, consider the size of a bat. Ontario’s bats range from the eastern small-footed bat, which at about four grams is less than half the weight of a chickadee, to Ontario’s biggest bat, the hoary bat, which at 30 grams (on average) weighs about as much as a house mouse. At roughly eight grams, a little brown bat weighs twice as much as a small-footed bat, but still only as much as two nickels and a dime.Yet their wingspan (22 to 27 centimetres for a little brown bat), with the skin stretched thinly between elongated finger bones, creates the illusion of a bigger animal.
Comparatively speaking, bat babies are giants. A newborn little brown bat weighs an astonishing 25 percent of its mother’s weight (in comparison, a human baby weighs about 6 percent of its mother’s weight). An eastern pipistrelle bat’s twins may collectively weigh one half of the mother’s weight. Little brown, northern long-eared and small-footed bats give birth to a single offspring; all other Ontario species produce litters of two or three offspring. Mating occurs in late summer or early fall, and a delayed fertilization occurs in early spring. The gestation period lasts seven to 14 weeks. Offspring are born in late spring and early summer, in nursery colonies found in tree cavities, attics and tree branches.
Watching a bat’s acrobatic aerial manoeuvring can be mesmerizing, but identifying them by species is challenging. Using a bat detector (a device that lowers the frequencies of bat voices, thus making them audible to us) helps with identification.
Some nature centres, naturalist clubs or conservation authorities host “bat walks,” which can be quite informative. Ontario’s bats have returned with the summer season. After the sun sets, enjoy the experience of a few close encounters.
www.batcon.org/bhra/economyhouse.html
