Conservancy district plans new home for colony of little brown bats at Clendening Lake

• The Clendening Marina near Freeport is home during the summer months to one of the largest known populations of little brown bats in Ohio.
• The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District, which owns the marina, plans to tear it down in 2025 but will reuse siding from the structure to build a new home for the bats.

CLENDENING LAKE ‒ Humans aren't the only ones who enjoy spending the summer at Harrison County's Clendening Lake.

So do little brown bats ‒ more than a thousand of them. The bats, which on average weigh less than an ounce and are about 3 inches in length, roost underneath the siding on the lake side of the Clendening Marina building near Freeport from March through October. They can squeeze into gaps in the siding as small as half the size of a golf ball.

They raise their young there.

No mosquito problems

But they will need a new home in the near future. The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District (MWCD), which owns the marina building, is going to tear it down and replace it with a new facility in 2025. However, MWCD officials are also mindful of the bats.

"What we want to do is reuse a lot of the siding on the building to build what we call bat condos, something that can accommodate a thousand-plus bats," said Matt Thomas, MWCD chief of conservation. "It's going to be in this general area. It doesn't have to be in this footprint. We want it to be near the marina to still provide a home for them and benefits for boaters, because they eat all types of insects, mosquitoes included."

Mosquitoes are not a nuisance at the 1,800-acre lake due to the presence of the bats. "We don't have any mosquito problems," said Aaron Trushell, the marina's manager. "We don't have to worry about selling the scented candles or anything here. They just set on the shelf."

The conservancy district has already begun erecting small bat boxes near the marina building.

One of the largest populations of little brown bats

When the marina building is taken down, it will be done in the winter months so as not to disturb the bats. "When they come back in the spring, hopefully, they'll have plenty of areas. Now whether they adopt that or not, we don't really know. I'm not a bat. But we can do the best we can," Thomas said.

It's one of the largest known populations of little brown bats in Ohio.

Little brown bats, like many bat species in North America, are threatened by White-nose syndrome, a fungal disease, according to the National Park Service. The disease was introduced from Europe. It started in New York in 2006 and has spread to more than half of the United States and five Canadian provinces. It has killed millions of bats, and scientists predict some regional extinction of bat species.

Study of the species

MWCD officials have known about the bat colony since 2021. That year, a bat tagged with a tracking device emerged from its winter hibernation in an abandoned railroad tunnel at Flushing in Belmont County. It was tracked by an airplane with a tracking receiver to Clendening Lake.

Trushell recalls that one day people came to the marina in a vehicle equipped with antennas. They were looking for that bat.

For the past two years, the MWCD has been helping to fund a study of the bats being done by Joseph Johnson, an ecologist and University of Cincinnati assistant professor of information technology.

Researchers tag the bats when they are juveniles. One room of the marina building is filled with equipment to monitor the bats' comings and goings.

"The bat population has always been here, but we really had no idea how many or the species," Thomas said.

Reach Jon at 330-364-8415 or at jon.baker@timesreporter.com.