Scientists hope the little crawlers will reveal the home-away-from-home of local bats as they continue to face critical habitat loss.

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Biologists with the Canadian Wildlife Federation hope a colony of bats in East Ottawa will help teach them more about what makes a bat a healthy and happy home.

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Biologists are capturing and tagging bats from a colony of about 200 in a building at the MacSkimming Outdoor Education Center in Cumberland, placing small transmitters they hope will take them to the bats’ home away from home.

“We know they use alternative roosts to where they will go based on weather and temperature,” said James Pagé, a species-at-risk and biodiversity expert with the Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF).

“It’s like his summer house and his weekend cabin.”

The population of little brown bats has been reduced in the last decade by as much as 90 percent due to white-nose syndrome. First identified in the province about 12 years ago, white-nose syndrome is caused by a fungus that disrupts bats’ winter hibernation, waking them up and sapping their energy at a time when there are few insects to feed on.

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While some bat populations in eastern Canada appear to have developed a resistance and are beginning to recover, bats still face critical habitat loss. That’s where Pagé’s study comes into play. He and his team hope to learn more about what a bat needs to survive, whether it’s in man-made structures like buildings, or in special bat boxes built just for them.

“White-nose syndrome is devastating, but we are more interested in habitat loss,” he said. “Imagine that the few who survive the white nose now face other threats.”

One of those threats is eviction.

“Normally when people find bats in their attic, especially if there are 200 of them, they get a little unsettled. So the bats are evicted. There is a way to do that that doesn’t hurt the bats, but if they leave and can’t get back in, where do they go? Will they be able to survive?

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“We think they do. We think they have a network of sites. But we don’t know what the network is.”

Pagé and other CWF biologists and volunteers gathered at the MacSkimming site Thursday night at sunset. With the help of Cambridge, Ontario. Bat expert Derek Morningstar erected traps and fine mist nets to catch bats as they emerged from their nest for the night. But the bats fooled the scientists. Somehow they evaded capture when they emerged after sunset, leaving biologists to wait for hours with their nets empty until the bats returned.

Eventually, several bats were caught around 2:30 am, Pagé said. Two were tagged with a small, harmless wing clip for future identification and had a miniature transmitter attached to their backs with surgical glue. The glue dissolves after a couple of weeks and the transmitter falls off, but until then, biologists can use an acoustic monitor to track the bats’ location and find out where they sleep during the day.

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Thursday’s results were disappointing. Pagé hoped to catch dozens of bats for the study and had 16 transmitters ready to go. He spent Friday tracking down the two who were tagged and plans to return to the site Monday to try to capture and tag more.

Another CWF team working at a nearby site had better luck, capturing great brown bats as part of a study of how that species is affected by mercury contamination.

Bats are vital for their role in insect control. A little brown bat can eat up to its own weight in insects every night, Pagé said.

But that’s not why he chose to study them.

“Therein lies the mystery of bats,” he said. “They fly at night, they dive. People see them and then they disappear. That attracts me. Bats are a very misunderstood creature. They’re mysterious, and unlike something to be nervous or unsettled about, I think it’s something to cherish.”