Another Indiana bat was found in the Ironton District of the Wayne National Forest in Laurence County on October 24 by Wayne National Forest Biologist Rosemary Boyle.  Other endangered species present in the Wayne National Forest are the Bald Eagle, The American Bear Beatle, a plant and a muscle.  Three other plants are listed as threatened.  The Wayne National Forest Service is revising its management plan in light of finding these species.

The Wayne National Forest Service is currently consulting with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge to determine if the suspended timber sales in the Ironton Unit of the Wayne National Forest should go forward.  The timber sales were suspended when six endangered Indiana Bats were found in the Wayne National Forest in 1997.

The Wayne National Forest Service was told by environmentalists that it should not permit logging of Bluegrass Ridge or the strip mining that was both permitted by the forest service because the Indiana Bat, an Endangered Species, was likely present.  Now, the bat has been found in the Athens Unit of the Wayne National Forest.  The Wayne National Forest Supervisor said that logging is being halted until a management plan is formed for the bat.  However, the Forest Service does plan to lease 5,000 acres of its land to oil and gas development, which also harms the old trees that Indiana Bats need to raise their young.

The Indiana bat eats far more mosquitoes than most any other kind of bat.  It offers a sane alternative to poisonous pesticides.  But it is on the verge of being eliminated as a species forever unless we preserve and restore more of its old-growth forest and pristine cave habitat.  Mother Indiana Bats raise their young in the bark of old trees that have become very rare in the over-logged and developed hillsides of southeast Ohio.

Below are some web articles about the bat.  Note that in other states much larger projects were slowed because the bat may be present, whereas the Wayne National Forest charged full speed with its devastating coal mining and logging permits because they had not actually found a bat.  Now they have found four Indiana Bats in the Athens Unit of the Wayne National Forest and one Indiana Bat in the Ironton Unit of the national forest, according to Wayne National Forest Supervisor Jose Zambroni.  The forest service now must prepare a management plan for this Endangered Species that should require the preservation and restoration of a much larger old-growth forest area.

This bat is in decline in large part because of the loss of old-growth forests in southeast Ohio that the bat depends upon.  Like the Cerelean Warbler that is a candidate species for the Endangered Species act, lives in the older forest of the Wayne National Forest and is in decline, the Indiana Bat is an indicator of a disrupted ecosystem that needs protected and restored.  Ohio has lost 99.996 percent of its original old-growth forest yet the last fragments of virgin forest are under attack.  And the older-second growth forests are fast disappearing as well.

From web news service:
Endangered bat may bottleneck Pennsylvania
          highway project

          Last updated 09/24/1998, 10:04 a.m. MT

                BALD EAGLE, Pa. (AP) — A 3-ounce nocturnal bat is shaping up to be a monster for
          Pennsylvania highway planners.
                The endangered Myotis sodalis, better known as the Indiana bat, is threatening to bottleneck a
          $500 million extension of Interstate 99.
                Biologists want to make sure the elusive bats won't be harmed by the planned route along a heavily
          forested ridge in Blair and Centre counties.
                "The thing that probably bothers me most is that people don't know if it's up there," said Kim D.F.
          Bartoo, an environmental manager with the state Department of Transportation. "Nobody's actually
          seen a bat up there, an Indiana bat, anyway."
                Pennsylvania has only five caves that contain the Indiana bat, a species considered to be an
          important enemy of mosquitoes and agricultural pests. One cave, an old limestone mine where 200 to
          300 bats hibernate in Blair County, is only 20 miles from the planned four-lane highway that would
          replace outmoded Route 220.
                Although the bats spend October through April in the caves, they are believed to range some 100
          miles during the summer. Biologists believe some bats from the Blair County cave may fly to Bald Eagle
          Mountain in the summer and roost in trees slated to be chopped down.
                Those concerns, as well as lawsuits and scientific data, led David Densmore of the U.S. Fish and
          Wildlife Service to reconsider the bat issue this summer.
                He is now recommending that crews cut down trees only during the winter, when bats would be
          hibernating.
                "When you whack down a forest, yeah, you're going to affect bats. You're going to affect a lot of
          things. But there's very few projects that are going to take the bats' entire foraging area," he said.

INDIANA BATS
       SCIENTIFIC NAME:
           Myotis sodalis

 The Indiana Bat is a primarily dark pinkish brown species.  It is the
 only bat in Ohio that is currently on the endangered species list.
 They live in the Midwestern and eastern U.S.  Mating takes place in
 the first ten days of October, and birthing commences in June when
 each female delivers one offspring.