July 18, 2013

Today was honestly my favorite day so far, the past few days I just wasn't feeling it. Although i loved the horses! But today was by far the best learning for me, i actually took a lot of notes. Most of this day we were at the Deschutes National Forest which is 1.6 million acres, also met I think 10 different people, who I found very interesting and nice. The introducing person for the day was Scott McBride, i think that is how you would spell his last name, we didn't get to hear a lot from him. After we met Scott we broke into two groups, Heritage students and white swan students. I was in the white swan group, and we were being talked to by Barbara Webb, she is a wildlife biologists. Barbara talked about the lava nature and how it is a great bat habitat, then she went into talking about the bats. The bats at the caves we were at are insect eaters, and they eat a lot of insects before they go into hibernation, bats are also starting to decrease in population due to the whitenose syndrome, which they believe was brought by the European travelers when going through bat caves. What whitenose syndrome is like a fungus which causes the bats to itch, when they're hibernating and can bother them to where they are going to starve to death, which is how they would die. Bats in Europe may be resistant to the disease because it is where they're from and bats from the U.S and Canada would not be so resistant because it is new to the bats. A big question is "how do we provide opportunities to people to be able to see bats and keep the bats safe?". 

After barbara was done talking we met Bart Wills who showed us the cave, he is the geologists for the forest, Bart  told us how the flow of lava formed the lava tubes and when it stopped and erupted and formed the caves. The cave was 1 mile long give or take, under the highway crosing US 97, it was 31 ft high and 50 ft thick.

To Be Continued....