The Okanagan’s low to mid elevation ecosystems have the greatest variety and population of bats in all of Canada because of its warm climate and diversity of terrain. Our warm summer nights allow young bats to fatten up while insect prey is abundant before hibernation.

Of the 15 B.C. bat species, these 14 species live in the Okanagan (*endangered or threatened):

· big brown bat (rptesicus fuscus)

· hoary bat (lasiurus cinereus)

· silver-haired bat (lasionycteris noctivagans)

· Yuma myotis (myotis yumanensis)

· Californian myotis (myotis californicus)

· little brown myotis (myotis lucifugus)

· long-legged myotis (myotis volans)

· Townsend’s big-eared bat * (corynorhinus townsendii a.k.a. plecotus townsendii)

· western long-eared myotis (myotis evotis)

· fringed myotis * (myotis thysanodes)

· western red bat (lasiurus blossevillii)

· spotted bat * (euderma maculatum)

· western small-footed myotis (myotis ciliolabrum)

· pallid bat * (antrozous pallidus)

Myotis means mouse-eared and these are our smaller, brown fur bats.

Bats are ecologically important for controlling insect populations. Yet despite their importance to our ecosystems, there’s more misinformation than fact, and more fear than respect for these fascinating night guardians. We need to appreciate them.

Here’s some amazing bat facts:

– Even though bats look like flying mice, they are more closely related to humans than they are to rodents.

– Bats are the longest living (20-40 years) and slowest reproducing small mammals on Earth.

– Like humans, young bats loose their baby, or milk, teeth before their adult teeth grow in.

– Bats are very clean animals, and groom themselves almost constantly (when not eating or sleeping).

– Our bats have small eyes but are not blind. Their eyesight is good and they have excellent echolocation so they do not become entangled in human hair.

– A single little brown myotis can eat up to 600 mosquitoes/hour. And a nursing mother can eat more than her body weight nightly (up to 4,500 insects).

– Little brown myotis heart rate reduces to 10 beats/minute (from 100-200 beats/min resting or 1,000 beats/min flying) and can take one breath/hr while hibernating.

– Our bats can squeeze into tiny crevices like behind pieces of bark to roost.

– Bat droppings (guano) in caves support whole ecosystems of unique organisms including bacteria useful in detoxifying wastes, improving detergents, and producing gasohol and antibiotics.

– The pallid bat is immune to the stings of the scorpions and centipedes upon which it feeds.

– Moths sometimes plummet to the ground when they hear the echolocation calls of bats in an attempt to escape.

If you’re curious about bats read Bats of British Columbia by David Nagorsen et al, 2022. This totally updated book is full of interesting information with numerous amazing colour photos throughout of bats close up and in action, and describes each bat species. Our library has it.

If you have bats check out bcbats.ca for details on safely removing bats from your house and properly placing bat boxes for them to move into. They’ll keep mosquitoes down in your yard. Bat houses provide places for roosting and raising young, replacing the dwindling natural sites available to them. Installing bat houses can help build valuable bat species populations that eat crop and forest damaging insects.

Watching bats

On hot summer days: roosting under eaves or bridges, in crevices in cliffs, trees, buildings, in umbrellas and shrubs.

At dusk: catching insects above lakes, ponds, large puddles, slow moving creeks and rivers.

Leaving bat boxes and maternity colonies alone.

Major threats to bats

Habitat destruction – especially forests, wetlands and wildlife trees (snags).

Vehicle collisions, domestic cats, pesticides, night sound pollution (road traffic, mining, etc), bat exterminations, wind turbines, solid mine closures, disease (white-nose syndrome), and now climate change.

Roseanne Van Ee enthusiastically shares her knowledge of the outdoors to help readers experience and enjoy nature. Follow her on Facebook.

They are some of the most delightfully coloured signs of spring. Some people say butterflies are like flying flowers.

These important pollinators live in almost every habitat from wetlands and bogs, to woodlands and forests, grasslands and meadows, and even deserts and mountains. Butterflies flow through four different interesting metamorphic stages from egg, to caterpillar (larvae), to chrysalis (pupae) and finally adult butterfly. Different species have different timelines to these stages. Some species can remain dormant in their pupal or egg stages to survive winters while other butterflies migrate.

Female butterflies lay eggs on specific food plants on which their caterpillar larvae will feed. Some species lay eggs singly, others in batches. Many females produce between one hundred to two hundred eggs.

Then, in their larval caterpillar stage they grow spending practically all of their time searching for and eating plant leaves.

Many species have long caterpillar life stages. Some are especially lovely and interesting. Many caterpillars defend themselves by camouflaging or freezing to resemble sticks or branches.

Some rear up waving their front ends with snake-like eyespots. Other caterpillars resemble bird droppings.

And some caterpillars have hairs and bristles for protection while others form dense aggregations. Caterpillars are most baby birds first foods, so please don’t poison them!Once fully developed, the caterpillar pupates into a chrysalis. When metamorphosis is complete, the pupal skin splits, the adult climbs out, and after its wings have expanded and dried, it flies off as a butterfly. Butterflies in their adult stage can live from a week to nearly a year depending on the species.

Butterflies suck up flower nectar through their elongated tubular proboscis mouthpart that can be coiled up when not in use and expanded when needed to feed by sucking or sipping. Flower nectar provides sugars for energy. Butterflies don’t carry as much pollen load as bees, but they can carry pollen over greater distances. Many species maintain territories and actively chase other species or individuals that may stray into them. Butterflies also sip water, salty liquids and dissolved minerals from wet sand or dirt which are vital for reproduction. Occasionally butterflies land on people, attracted to the salt in human sweat.

Butterfly wings are covered in minute irreplaceable scales that create the wings’ vibrant colours and markings. These scales can easily rub off. So never pick up a butterfly by its delicate wings. Butterflies can only fly when their body temperature is above 27 °C. When it is cool, they expose their wings to the sunlight to heat themselves up. Basking is common in the cooler summer morning hours. Most early spring and alpine species have dark wings to help gather more heat. If their body temperature reaches 40 °C, they can position themselves with folded wings edgewise to the sun.

When resting, butterflies usually fold up their four wings holding them up above their bodies displaying their cryptic-colour wing undersides to safely camouflage. Butterflies are diurnal with club-tipped antennas with sensory receptors that detect odours and feel wind. (Their subtle coloured moth cousins are nocturnal with feathery antennas.) Taste receptors are located on their feet. Butterflies have good colour vision and most are sensitive to ultraviolet light. Some butterflies can hear and some species make clicking sounds.

There are over 18,000 species worldwide with about 750 different butterflies in North America. The trick to identifying butterflies is to learn the basic different groups by their size, wing shape, colour and markings. The family names often resemble their characteristics; Swallow Tails, Whites, Sulphurs, Coppers, Blues, Crescents, Checkerspots, Anglewings, Hairstreaks, Skippers and more. Get to know some of the common butterflies in your area and how to attract them to your yard. If you’d like to help endangered species, this is a great place to start!

Declining butterfly populations is consistent with the rapidly decreasing insect populations around the world right now. Many butterfly habitats are being destroyed by urban and industrial development. And butterflies, their caterpillars, and food sources are being poisoned with insecticides, herbicides, pesticides, etc.

Their natural predators include ants, spiders, wasps and birds.

Our outstanding local entomologist, Ward Strong says, “The main thing about butterflies I’ve noticed over the last 25 years is the huge decline in both numbers and species. We still commonly see swallowtails, mourning cloaks, and blues, but rarely find checkerspots, coppers, anglewings, fritillaries, etc and more.” How sad! But we can reverse this trend if we want. You can help them by simply establishing habitat in your own backyard!

Attract our native butterflies into your yard by growing the appropriate native plants for their food and shelter. Certain plants have evolved and co-exist with our native butterflies. The Allan Brooks Nature Centre has a handy checklist of North Okanagan butterflies with their habitats and appearance months. They also have Milkweed seeds vital for Monarchs. Join the Butterflies in My Backyard (BIMBY) project at davidsuzuki.org/bimby

And we are so fortunate to have a marvellously useful field guide, Butterflies of British Columbia, by award-winning science writer and naturalist John Acorn. It includes very handy quick-at-a-glance references to B.C.’s butterfly groups with spectacular illustrations, dazzling colour photos, distinguishing butterfly features, geographic ranges, behaviour and preferred food plants. Our library has copies to help get you started.

Some of our common local butterflies:

•Mourning Cloaks – often first seen spring butterflies

•Western Spring Azure – our first “blue” to flutter around

•Pine White

•Western Tiger Swallowtail – often mistaken for Monarchs. Swallowtails have yellow and black wings with a “tail” sticking out from each wing.

•Painted Lady – migrate over long distances

•Red Admiral

•Clouded Sulphur – common yellow butterflies – maybe the origin of “butterfly”

•Desert Orange Tip – chrysalis for several years

Roseanne Van Ee

Get Outdoors

Did you know that people have brown fat? I didn’t — until recently. I knew that bears, squirrels, winter birds and other wildlife do to survive the cold — but people?

Brown fat (AKA brown adipose tissue) helps maintain your body temperature when you get too cold. It’s the same fat that bears have to stay warm when they hibernate and then gives them energy to rewarm out of hibernation. Brown fat works the same way for mammals, like squirrels, that go into torpor (a mini-hibernation) when it’s dangerously cold.

Brown fat acts as a built-in heater. Human babies are born with brown fat on their upper backs. You lose most of it as you get older and then form a shiver response to cold temperatures. Although you lose most of your brown fat as you grow, you may hold on to some of it. Some adults have small amounts of brown fat around the shoulders, neck, collarbone, kidneys and spinal cord. Lean people typically have more brown fat than overweight people. Women also tend to have more than men.

You also have another type of fat — white fat which is different. White fat builds up when you take in extra calories storing it to use when you don’t get enough energy from food. It’s made of big droplets of lipids, or fatty acids. Most of the fat in your body is white fat; typically stored in your thighs, hips and waistline. Too much white fat in your belly can raise your risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

But, cells in brown fat are packed with iron-rich mitochondria giving brown fat its colour. They take in nutrients like sugar and white fat and break them down to make energy. Brown fat stores more energy in a smaller space than white fat does. When your body gets cold it signals the mitochondria to start churning out energy. This creates the warmth that helps you maintain your body temperature. It creates heat without shivering and burns calories. Brown fat may decrease obesity and some metabolic problems.

All people have some “constitutive” brown fat which they’re born with. There’s also “recruitable” brown fat formed under the right circumstances. Here’s how:

Turn the temperature down and go for winter walks

Exposing yourself to cool and even cold temperatures may help recruit brown fat. Just two hours of exposure each day to temperatures around 19 degrees Celsius may be enough to gain recruitable brown fat. Consider taking a cold shower or bath. During winter, turn the thermostat down a few degrees in your home and go outside in cold weather to cool down.

Eat well

Brown fat burns calories and helps you stay leaner and healthier. A well-balanced diet of healthy unprocessed foods certainly helps too.

Exercise

Exercise may signal hormones that create brown fat. Exercise fights obesity, keeps the cardiovascular system running strong and has so many other health benefits. Do a minimum of one of the following every week:

• 150 minutes of moderate activity, such as walking

• 75 minutes of vigorous activity, such as cross country skiing

Sleep Naked

So they say. Keeping cool at night helps recruit brown fat.

Brown fat research

Researchers know that brown fat burns calories and may help control blood sugar, improve insulin levels and may also help remove fats from blood. Most brown fat studies have been done on mice. More research is needed on people.

Roseanne Van Ee enthusiastically shares her knowledge of the outdoors to help readers experience and enjoy nature. Follow her on Facebook

Ninety per cent of our water comes from frozen water vapour as snow. And water is amazing! It continually morphs into liquid, solid ice, vapour, rain and frozen, crystalline snow. This makes snow part of the great never-ending water cycle. Think of the rivers, streams, lakes, groundwater, rain, vapour and snow as an ongoing water cycle circulatory system. All our water eternally circulates in a closed-loop system between our atmosphere, earth’s soil and everything alive within. Water is vital to all life on Earth, and in the Okanagan snow is a critical link in that system. We eventually drink our snow as water.

We live in a majorly snow-dominated watershed — high elevation lakes and forests release snowmelt into our valley. Creeks runoff mostly April to July and peak in the valley bottom lakes May to June. Hydrologists measure the depth and weight of snow throughout winter at high elevation snow survey points in undisturbed snow patches to determine the year’s water availability.

But our upper watersheds, mostly on crown land, get multiple uses; forestry, cattle grazing, recreation and mining. These are managed to minimize impacts on snow which eventually affects water quality. It’s critically important to keep animal and human wastes and sediment out of water. Clean water needs less expensive water treatment. So, during winter, stay on established trails and roads for human safety, to prevent erosion and to protect our water supply. Use the toilet before going out to enjoy the snow, pack out your garbage and minimize pollution. Maintain the quality and quantity of snow.

Snow can be powdery light if dry, or tediously heavy when wet. Snowflakes drift down from the sky at two to six km/hr, or faster if windy. They are clear crystals, like sugar and salt, that appears white as it piles up.

Where the climate is cold enough for year-to-year accumulation, a glacier may form. Otherwise, snow typically melts in the spring running off into watershed streams and recharging groundwater. Unlike many other parts of Canada, just a few centimetres of snow settles in Vernon. It can come and go through winter.

Then just a half-hour drive uphill, two to three meters of snow settles throughout the winter. Vernon’s single largest water source, BX Creek, starts on Silver Star Mountain. Some runoff settles in Swan Lake then flows through BX Creek into Vernon Creek then into Okanagan Lake then through the Columbia River out to the Pacific Ocean between Washington and Oregon. Interestingly, snow on the east side of Silver Star flows down Vance or Putnam Creeks, through the Shuswap to the Thompson and Fraser Rivers and out to the Pacific through Vancouver.

More of our water comes from snow than from rain in the Okanagan.

More water evaporates from our Okanagan lakes during our hot, dry summers than is replaced by rain or snow; so our lakes are receding.

Amazing that so little snow settles in Vernon when one of the snowiest places on Earth is only a couple hours away in the mountains around Revelstoke. Rogers Pass gets the highest annual snowfall of all highways in the world; about 8.7 m/year. The record is twice that. And the steeper the terrain, the greater the likelihood of avalanches. That’s the reason for the series of highway snowsheds. Higher up on Mt. Copeland, about 20 km northwest of Revelstoke, holds the Canadian record of 24.5 m. Now that’s a lot of snow! Eventually, its runoff generates hydroelectric power giving us some of the lowest electricity rates.

So please take care of our snow — it’s our water!

This article is written for the Vernon Morning Star by Roseanne Van Ee. Roseanne enthusiastically shares her knowledge of the outdoors to help readers experience and enjoy nature. Discover exciting and adventurous natural events, best trails, and wild places. Follow her on Facebook for more.