Providing students with the opportunity to discover our local urban biodiversity, and empowering them to share this knowledge with our community, is the goal of Cal Poly Pomona Fall Bat Week. Each year, 20 students learn about and experience bat research, build bat conservation tools (bat boxes), and then plan and lead a fun campus bat evening outreach event. This year the students provided a variety of activities including: bat walks, a bat predator-prey game, a scavenger hunt for the plants that moths pollinate (a major part of bats diet), a show n' tell with bat boxes, and an arts and crafts tent. The project was dreamt up by two professors who love bats: Dr Rachel Blakey (Cal Poly Pomona) and Dr Joy O'Keefe (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).
How can you help?
After running an extremely successful inaugural program, we need help funding our next season and allowing the students to conduct ongoing research. We need bat detectors for both the students and the participants, so that folks can learn all about bat echolocation. The students also need equipment for nocturnal activities including spotlights and head lamps, plus we need to replace the vinyl cutter in our Maker Studio, so that we can cut some more of our extremely popular bat stickers, designed by one of our Cal Pol Pomona students! We would also like to fly co-leader of the project Dr O'Keefe over from Urbana-Champaign to inspire the students again in 2024, the students insist on it! Finally, in order for our Fall Bat Week to be inclusive to all students, we want to pay our participants for their labor building bat boxes and educating the public. If we exceed our fundraising goal, we can also pay a student coordinator to run our bat box monitoring program and conduct research on the results!
Are you local and free on Giving Day Wednesday (17th April)?
We invite you to come to campus and meet us at the Biotrek Ethnobotany gardens at 7pm! Team Fall Bat Week (CPP undergraduates from three colleges: Olivia Garcia, Rachel Hester, Karen Hung, Julliete Martinez, Pedro Rosales) have organized an event "Red Light Bat Night" and will teach you about how bats perceive the world, give you some free bat stickers and candy, take you on a walk to record bat calls, and treat you to some bat arts and crafts! There will be pizza and sodas for a small donation. Please register to ensure your spot on one of the bat walks - they are very popular!
Your support can really make our day take flight – thank you for being an AmBATssador for the cause!
*Art by Jaime Neill (who is studying bats in agroecosystems for her Masters at Cal Poly Pomona)
