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The bat population seems to be starting to make a slow recovery after it was decimated by white nose syndrome, which started to rip through the province's bat colonies – and others throughout North America – in 2011.

Last week, a New Brunswick researcher reported the discovery of several maternity colonies with healthy bats and pups, leading to a glimmer of optimism for the future of bats in that province.

Donald Sam, a species at risk biologist with Nova Scotia's Department of Lands and Forestry, said the population here also seems to be starting the long road to recovery.

“We're a little ahead of New Brunswick, not to compare,” Sam said. “We identified maternity sites four years ago, mostly on Crown land because that's what we have easy access to.”

He said department staff have gone back to those sites several times, and the numbers are growing over the four years.

“Encouragingly, yes,” he said. “It's not huge numbers, but at the biggest site the numbers went from 150 to about 500.”

He said other sites with smaller populations are also seeing increases.

“The trend is encouraging,” he said.

He said there were no previous numbers to use for comparison, but the amount of guano at the site gives a clue.

“Based on that, you can get a sense of how many bats were there and how long they were there,” he said. “It's not nearly (like it was) because there had been bats all over that building, and now they're clustered in one specific spot. ... I would suspect it was in the thousands at that spot.”

He said one theory for the increase is that the bats are survivors of white nose and have some immunity to white nose syndrome that is being passed on to their young.

“We definitively don't know whether these are bats that squeezed through it and won't be affected in the future,” he said.

“The trend is positive. If the bats were being hammered every year (by the fungus) I don't think you'd see these increases year over year.”

It's estimated that 95 per cent of the bat population was wiped out by the fungus.

He said there are three sites on Crown land being monitored, and about half a dozen others on private land that they can't visit as often.

The province initiated the field studies, but are now working in conjunction with the Mersey Tobiatic Research Institute.

Sam described the increase as a “small R rebound, but I would say we are on a rebound. It's going to take a long, long time if we ever get back to the full complement. It's a good news story that they're still here and seems to be bouncing back.”

