M.S. Student, School of Natural Resources
2020

Advisor(s): Craig Allen, Dirac Twidwell

Christopher Fill

Batting around career options in Nebraska

For master’s student Christopher Fill, coming to the University of Nebraska was a “bat decision.”

He had worked with bats as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and since graduating with a biology degree, worked in several seasonal positions. After studying prairie chickens in Nebraska, he was told by a university researcher that the new National Research Traineeship (NRT) program at Nebraska needed a “bat person.”

“I loved and appreciated the time I had spent working for the University of Nebraska with the prairie chickens and was excited to return to the state,” Fill said.

The NRT position would allow him to further his education with a master’s degree besides providing him two years of paid work with wildlife. He applied and was accepted. Now people are asking the Massachusetts native how he found this opportunity in Nebraska.

“I like to say the bats found me,” Fill says. “I hadn’t necessarily been looking for them.”

He is now though. His position involves discovering how abundant bats are on farmlands and how they use the fields when out of hibernation.

“I’m putting out detectors on farmlands,” Fill explains. “You won’t know the number of bats, but based on the amount of calls, you can gain insight into activity patterns, and if you get quality calls, you can actually identify a species based off its call.”

Bats navigate at night through what’s called “echolocation.” They emit high-frequency sounds, or “calls,” and based off the sounds coming back to them, can read their environment. The recorder Fill uses picks up the ultrasonic signals and displays them as sound files.

“Once they want more information about something, an insect for instance, they’ll start echolocating faster, and you’ll get what's called ‘feeding buzzes.’ So, you can interpret what the bat’s doing,” Fill says.

Bats help farmers by eating insects.

“They can eat up to twice their body weight in insects, and some studies estimate bats save farmers more than 3.7 billion dollars a year in crop damage,” Fill says.

Fill in the field with equipment

Because of that, scientists in some states are especially concerned about bat populations. A fungus thought to have been brought over from Europe to New York has been spreading across the United States and is decimating bats. The fungus appears as a white fluff on the bats’ nose, and hence, the disease is called “white nose syndrome.”

Fill and Craig Allen, director of the NRT program, are putting out detectors to analyze activity patterns of Nebraska’s bats, ways the bats use farmlands, and methods to sustain them and their benefit to farmers and the food supply. 

“Bats do not use all landscapes the same,” Fill says. “A wide open cornfield provides less cover, and it takes more energy to fly farther. It’s pretty well established that bats like forests and trees and water, so we want to see how the different species use airspace over agricultural fields.”

He says he has found a wealth of information and resources at the university to support his work in studying wildlife and natural resources.

“People are conducting research here that matters,” he says. “I know my research here will advance the work I do one day in wildlife biology, conservation or management. This is a great place to be.”

Apparently, good things come from bat decisions.

— Ronica Stromberg, National Research Traineeship Program Coordinator   

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