Why Texas Bats Need a Better Commute

As dusk settled over a Fort Worth city park in June 2022, Manuel de Oyarzabal Barba joined a rotating crew of collaborators for a ritual the group would repeat multiple times a week until September. The team set up its equipment: two large thermal cameras and a microphone connected to a field-recording system. That summer and the following spring, de Oyarzabal Barba, then a master’s student in environmental science at Texas Christian University, and his colleagues made repeat visits to thirty sites across two Tarrant County parks, where passersby often mistook their high-tech gear for telescopes.“People thought we were looking at the moon,” de Oyarzabal Barba said, adding that parkgoers usually reacted with fear when he explained that the team was recording bats in flight. “Since the…

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