Bat Gate Installed at Maine Cave to Protect Bats From Disease

It sounds like something out of the campy Batman TV series from the 60s. Batman says to Robin "Deploy the Bat Gate!" But this bat gate is real and it's the first of it's kind in Maine. The Department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took a team to former mine in Maine that is home to bats that soon will be hibernating for the winter. The gate isn't to keep them in, it's the keep people out.

The  10 x 8 foot steel gate is design so that it doesn't change the environment for the bats and the can come and go through the gate with ease. People cannot.

This is all to help prevent white nose syndorme, a fungas that can be carried in by people hiking thorugh the woods and transferring spores into the bat's habitat. White nose syndrome has been known to wipe out as much a 90% of a bat population in these habitats.

The one ton gate wasn't easy to build, but it will definitely keep people out and the bats safe.