Erika Noel to speak about the bats of Kern County, Aug. 29

Please join us for our next Audubon meeting Tuesday, Aug. 29 at 7 p.m. We meet in the Golden Hills Elementary School cafeteria, 20215 Park Rd., Tehachapi. Refreshments and a raffle are an added bonus.

Erika Noel is a senior biologist with McCormick Biological, Inc., a consulting firm stationed in Bakersfield, California, where she coordinates, conducts and supervises field surveys and monitoring activities for several infrastructure improvement projects. Noel has extended experience focusing on special status species data collection and mitigation, primarily with San Joaquin kit fox and western bat species.

Noel's first love is bats. She began studying bats in 2014 after assisting Patricia Brown with her data collection on California Leaf nosed bats as part of Brown's study for bat foraging in restoration areas of the Lower Colorado River in California and Arizona.

Since, Noel has continued to focus her career on western bat species. Noel completed a master's degree and thesis at Cal State University, Bakersfield, in which she investigated the seasonal trends in bat fauna along the Kern River, from low elevation areas of the southern San Joaquin Valley to Kernville, California. Her findings included some surprises, such as the prevalence of red bats and mastiff bats in the Bakersfield area, and detections of spotted bats within the upper Kern River watershed.

Erika is an active member of the Western Bat Working Group and leads the regional Kern Bat Working Group.