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When Anneliese Pinnell’s parents asked her what she wanted for Christmas in 2025, she said, “A rabies vaccine.” And it wasn’t the first time she’d asked for one.

Fast-forward to summer 2026. The UNC-Chapel Hill junior — now properly vaccinated and thrilled about it — gently removes a small, chirping, ginger-colored bat from a mist net and places it into a mesh bag.

“I think it’s an Eastern red,” Pinnell says.

She heads to a sterile examination table and begins taking the bat’s measurements: weight, wing length, age, sex. She calls out each datapoint while research technician Yanira Rodriguez-Mendez records the information. Around the table, other members of the team, all dressed in scrubs, are doing the same with bats of their own.

In addition to Pinnell and Rodriguez-Mendez, the team includes Carolina biologist and project lead Rada Petric, junior Savannah Carter, research technician Hannah Shepard, and Olivia Munzer, an independent wildlife consultant.

“Each one of them brings different strengths to this project,” Petric says. “We are the bat girls, and this is the best team I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.”

Once the data collection is complete, they lift their hands toward the crescent moon and unfurl their fingers. The bats launch into the darkness to continue their night of feasting. Each will eat roughly half its body weight in insects, between 1,000 and 3,000 of them, before returning to its roost.

The team repeats this process for hours: net, capture, collect data, release, repeat.

But when they capture a state-endangered tricolored bat or a federally endangered northern long-eared bat, they add another step. Before release, they attach a small radio transmitter.

The goal is to track the bats back to their roost sites on Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, helping the military identify critical habitat and make more informed decisions about how these areas are managed and used for training, construction, and other mission activities.

The researchers work until 2 a.m., and it’s been a successful night. They’ve netted 64 bats, including nine tricolored. After packing up their gear, they return to their Airbnb in New Bern to get some sleep before doing it all over again the next day.

Operation: bat conservation

“Why are you at a military installation doing bat work?”

It’s the question Petric hears most often.

The Department of Defense manages more than 25 million acres of land across military installations in the U.S. Those lands contain entire ecosystems of plants and animals, including some species found nowhere else. That’s why most installations employ scientists to help manage natural resources, protect historic sites, comply with federal regulations, and build relationships with environmental partners.

“We have the opportunity to protect and conserve threatened or endangered species on these lands,” says Jessica Guilianelli, the natural resources manager for the air station. “It’s an interesting position to be in and one few people know much about.”

When the U.S. Navy issued a call for bat research proposals at Cherry Point in 2024, Petric immediately applied.

“I work with a lot of endangered species, especially in western North Carolina,” she says. “My goal was to do this research from mountains to sea. This call helped me get an east coast bat research project up and running.”

To understand why projects like this matter, it helps to understand the challenge facing bats across North Carolina and beyond.

In the early 2000s, cave explorers from Europe inadvertently introduced a deadly fungal disease called white-nose syndrome to bats in the United States. By 2010, the disease had reached North Carolina, devastating populations of northern long-eared, tricolored, and little brown bats.

The fungus thrives in the caves and mines where these bats hibernate. It infects their noses and wings and repeatedly wakes them during winter, causing them to burn through critical energy reserves while searching for insects that aren’t available. Many eventually starve.

For Petric, documenting this decline isn’t enough. To help endangered populations recover, researchers first need to understand where surviving bats are living. At Cherry Point, that challenge has sent the team across thousands of acres of forests, wetlands, and training grounds in search of radio signals.

Reconnaissance in the pines

When the bat girls are on base, they tend to stand out. A group of women driving around in a beat-up red truck with a five-foot antenna isn’t exactly inconspicuous.

“We actually got reported for the antenna,” Pinnell says, chuckling. “People see us coming, and we look suspicious, which is understandable. That isn’t something you see every day.”

But that’s how the team locates roost sites. After fitting a tricolored bat with a tiny, pill-sized radio transmitter attached with a medical adhesive, the researchers return during daylight hours to track its signal back to where it spends the day.

“This is probably the hardest job we have to do at the installation,” Petric says. “We have no idea where those bats are. So we have to drive around with these antennas and try homing in on a signal. And when we find it, we have to trek through the landscape to figure out exactly where they are.”

For Pinnell, this work feels like a full-circle moment.

Growing up beside Eno River State Park in Durham, she developed an early love of the outdoors. She first met Petric in middle school during a bat-netting event at summer camp. Years later, they met again at the Highlands Biological Station, where Pinnell spent five weeks learning about bird banding and handling.

Pinnell’s path to Cherry Point began in Wendell in July 2025, while sitting in a kayak with Petric in the middle of a swamp. She’d volunteered to help at another bat survey and was loving every minute of it.

“I told Rada that I really liked doing this work. It was just so cool,” Pinnell shares. “And then she asked me if I wanted to do it again next summer.”

While she enjoys fieldwork, Pinnell also excels at analyzing large datasets. She helps monitor the 33 acoustic devices recording bat calls across the air station. When combined and mapped, those recordings can reveal hotspots of bat activity, helping the team identify promising netting locations and potential roost sites.

During the 2026 field season, they captured 29 tricolored bats, which led them to 10 roost sites across the base.

From trainees to team members

Summer fieldwork can be grueling. Temperatures climb into the upper 90s during much of the season, and netting is far more than an evening activity. Team members head to their field sites in the afternoon to begin preparations, pounding rebar into the ground to support 10- to 30-foot-tall poles and carefully setting up — and often untangling — the mist nets that will capture bats after dark.

Their field sites are often in landscapes that shift between forest and shallow ponds, creating pockets of habitat that feel swamp-like in summer heat. As they wait for bats to fly into nets each evening, they encounter plenty of other wildlife: luna moths, stag beetles, dragonflies. But this summer, their most constant companions have been chiggers. They repeatedly coat themselves in bug spray to keep the tiny pests at bay.

For Savannah Carter, long stretches of time outside are part of the appeal.

The Carolina junior has worked with Petric since fall 2025, when she spent a semester at the Highlands Field Site in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The program trains students to conduct scientific research, from fieldwork and laboratory methods to data analysis and publication.

While there, Carter worked on an observational bat study, hiking to abandoned mines to install cameras and acoustic monitors. The project gave her valuable experience studying endangered bat populations, hibernation patterns, and responses to environmental change, but opportunities for animal handling were limited.

“I got involved with the current project because I wanted to have more interactions with the bats,” Carter says. “I thought it would be a great chance for me to get handling experience and learn more about them, especially on the coast where few studies have been done.”

To handle the bats, all researchers must receive pre-exposure rabies vaccinations. They wear sterile scrubs, masks, and caps to help prevent disease transmission, along with two layers of gloves: leather work gloves underneath and latex gloves on top. While they’re trained to handle bats carefully and safely, squirming and occasional bites are inevitable.

“At first I was so scared to hold them,” Carter says. “I didn’t want to hurt them. But Rada helped me develop this skill, and I feel so confident now.”

“Savannah is a joy to work with because I can rely on her,” Petric adds. “I know she is going to follow proper protocol, and she’ll do it confidently.” 

Growing the ranks

Training the next generation of researchers is one of Petric’s top priorities. Many of her research technicians are former students from the Highlands Field Site, including Rodriguez-Mendez and Shepard.

“I think it’s important to provide young people with real-world research experience. Experience that’s not just grunt work, where they have the ability to also devise their own questions and answer those questions while we’re in the field,” says Petric, who believes cultivating new talent is especially important as fewer researchers enter the field of bat conservation.

The need is urgent. More than half of North America’s bat species face a moderate to high risk of extinction over the next 15 years due to threats ranging from white-nose syndrome and climate change to habitat loss and energy infrastructure development. Wind turbines alone are responsible for hundreds of thousands of wildlife fatalities each year.

The research at military installations can help address both challenges at once: protecting vulnerable species while training future conservation scientists. Once roost sites are identified, the environmental staff at the installation can take over monitoring efforts, freeing Petric and her team to begin similar projects elsewhere.

“I would love to do this work at every military installation in North Carolina,” Petric says. “Understanding how these species are utilizing these landscapes will give us more information about their health overall, and what management techniques we need to implement to conserve them.”