As a junior in college, I encountered a rare opportunity: a biologist asked me if I wanted to have a research project of my own. I would have no real supervision; just the keys to an old, near-retirement Ford Ranger and a map of bridges in the nearest three counties in western Montana. I would spend those months looking for bats under every bridge–over 600 of them.
At the same time, I interviewed with a large timber company. The position paid better than any job I ever had, and I’d get to fly across the country working on different projects. I pretended that it was difficult decision to make. But when I went to bed that night, I clutched my quilt to my chest and grinned into the dark. The words “my research” tumbled around in my thoughts, sparking a warm feeling in my chest. I never did make decisions with my head.
My only reservation was that I wished I could do wilder, more remote fieldwork. I wouldn’t exactly need to backpack into the wild to reach a bridge. I didn’t expect an adventure. But in the coming months, I would dash across four lanes of traffic, swim across rivers, climb fences and get zapped by the electric ones; I’d have close encounters with moose, and find little surprises underneath the most innocuous-looking bridge–oh, I would find out.
The Mistakes
At first, I mistakenly believed that bridges would be straightforward and easy to inspect for bats. Then I Googled “bridge structures” and as soon as I got past the abutment and into the spread footer, I realized I didn’t know anything about bridges and where bats might be on them.
The first few days of survey, I puttered around some bridges near Missoula. Even though I wore an official-looking hard hat and drove a government truck, I felt absurd. My whole life I worked according to a supervisor’s schedule and I accepted whatever amount of work they felt was reasonable. Now I only answered to myself.
Errors in judgment piled up. I brought overnight gear for trips that were only fifteen minutes from home and returned embarrassed. Equipment vanished somehow; I even left my backpack with wallet inside next to a bridge. By the time I remembered and turned back for it, the backpack disappeared. A kind soul had taken it to a nearby fire station and dropped it off. Somehow the only contact information they could find within the pack was a phone number on a birthday check from my grandma. When they called her out of nowhere, telling her my backpack was found cast off by the side of the road, she immediately thought I must be dead and called the rest of the family.
In the early spring, freezing water flooded the bridges nearly to the deck. Even later in the summer, the water could be cold and high. I hadn’t exactly planned on dealing with rivers. At first I stripped down to my sports bra, put on water shoes and dove right in, receiving some very puzzled looks from folks driving by and no doubt wondering what the hell this “government employee” was up to. Eventually I wised up and purchased a pair of old neoprene waders from the local thrift store to use instead.
The hardest part of bridge surveys was locating them, followed immediately after by accessing them. Although I had a list of GPS coordinates, I could drive right past one without knowing it was there. Even when I found it, sometimes I couldn’t park safely anywhere near it–especially interstate or highway bridges. As an added safety measure, I obtained an obnoxious flashing light which I would pop onto the hood of the truck, hoping that my official-looking setup would give me credibility. And indeed it did–perhaps too well. A concerned citizen approached one day, looked at me and my clipboard and high-vis vest and asked, “Are you inspecting the bridge? Is it safe to drive on?”
Careful study of America’s bridges from below is actually pretty disturbing. “Oh, it’s safe,” I assured him, ignoring the crumbly-looking piles. I was past the newbie stage: I looked self-assured enough to be a Bridge Expert now.
The Bats
No one was sure, least of all me, that I would actually find any bats underneath bridges in Montana. While bats often use bridges at lower latitudes, we didn’t know if they would use the bridges in the cold north. For the first few weeks I only learned to identify their sign: little bat poops had pointed ends rather than the little round balls that mice leave behind. Urine stains were grouped high on the walls where only a roosting bat could deposit them. I loved finding large piles of evidence, proof that bats were here at some point, and maybe they would be again.
I hoped to find some bats soon, because my volunteers were about to join me. Earlier in the spring I sent out a volunteer position announcement to all the other wildlife undergraduates. As a volunteer myself I had no money to pay them, but I advertised anyway. At a school full of wildlife majors desperate for experience to list on their resume, students fought over unpaid volunteer gigs.
Well, not bridge surveys, it turned out. My solicitation received only two replies from undergraduates, Carrie and Macy. I reviewed their resumes, called them up and pretended to interview them, but they were already hired on willingness alone.
Then I cruised the back roads of Montana with sidekicks, and bless them, I somehow lucked out with the best employees I could’ve asked for. Both of them showed up on time every time and tolerated me with incredible patience that I didn’t deserve. They watched with either stunned amusement or horror when I swam across weed-choked reservoirs and got tangled up in the vegetation, and they served as traffic lookouts when I pressed my face to cracks in the pavement, belly-down in the middle of highways. Neither of them ever complained, even though the job was dirty and often gross.
Soon after the volunteers joined me, we found our first actual bat roosting in a bridge abutment. Not long after, we began to locate groups of bats. In late June I walked underneath an interstate bridge, pointed my super-bright flashlight up at a seam that ran the entire length of the bridge, and found over a hundred little animals wedged inside. I was thrilled beyond reason, unable to stop smiling. We weren’t wasting our time out there–we were doing some real science.
The Weird Stuff
After three months of looking very closely at bridges, I’m convinced that they reflect the oddest parts of humanity. Just some of the strange objects we found under bridges included:
- An entire pallet of Top Ramen noodles (how did they get there??)
- Treasure hunt clues
- Various geocaches (so many geocaches)
- A dead elk missing its head and genitals
- Humans (both live and…uncertain)
We wandered around the tucked-away corners of Montana where I wouldn’t have otherwise known to visit. Since I surveyed Forest Service and urban bridges alike, sometimes we would drive back into the woods for hours just to reach one bridge. Forest days were my favorite days, although we found fewer bats. Even when I could have driven home, I often chose to camp out and pick huckleberries instead.
While Carrie and I drove on a forest road one day, we spotted one of the weirder sightings: a sparkly evening dress hanging from a makeshift cross.
We both stopped and stared for a while. We couldn’t figure out why someone would have gone to that effort in the middle of the forest? Later, miles away, we found a second dress, more casual than the first. We had never felt uncomfortable in the woods, but we got plenty of looks from folks who were surprised to see two women in in the middle of nowhere in a government truck. Once an enraged older man who thought I was parked too close to his property screamed at me, and another made some snide comments as I gassed up my government truck at the pump, but in the woods, I felt safe.
Later that night we chose a dispersed campsite. We had just built a fire and were getting ready to make dinner when a white pickup came flying down the road. We hadn’t seen anyone drive by yet so we both looked up. The driver slammed on the brakes, got out and approached us. His uniform and badge revealed that he was a Forest Service LEO (law enforcement officer). I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I looked nervously at our fire. Were we not supposed to camp here? He’d stopped pretty urgently.
He solemnly handed me his card. “There are strange people out here,” he said, looking at us intently. “I mean it. Call me if you see anything…strange.”
And then he got in his truck and drove away.
The End
Like most life events, I didn’t realize what a spectacular summer I’d had until the end of it. On paper, I had visited 412 bridges in three counties, documented bat sign at nearly 50% of them, and found maternity colonies and roosting bats.
The rest is hidden between the lines. The beautiful summer days I spent navigating wild backroads and lush green hiking trails. Freezing alpine lakes where I took a break from surveys and swam until my entire body was numb from cold. A huckleberry patch so bountiful, I filled a whole Nalgene within minutes. Happening upon “Big Pine”, an over 350-year-old gentle giant which is the third largest ponderosa pine tree in the United States. The peace I felt while paddling across a calm, moonlit lake when the bats began to fly around me in a flurry of whispering wings.
For the first time in my life, I asked my own research questions and thought about the best way to answer them. Even though I had done science projects before and was halfway to graduating with a bachelor’s in science, I realized I had only really done those projects out of necessity, not my own curiosity. I had been extremely lucky to be handed this opportunity, and I told myself that one day I would strive to provide opportunities for young researchers who lacked experience. Someone, somewhere along the way has to take a chance on you first.
Even though this part doesn’t get written into the research papers, now I knew. I understood the long and dreadful uncertainty whether my research would ever amount to anything. And eventually, I found out the pure joy of looking up and finding my elusive study subject staring back.
