Crews thin trees at Mark Twain Lake to help 200,000 endangered Indiana bats

Every autumn, as forests begin to thin naturally, another kind of clearing takes place around Missouri’s Mark Twain Lake. This time, the goal is not timber production or development, but making room for one of North America’s most vulnerable bats. According to a report by WGEM, about 200,000 endangered Indiana bats spend the warmer months in the forests surrounding the lake before heading east to hibernate at Sodalis Nature Preserve near Hannibal. That represents roughly one-third of the species’ entire North American population, making the landscape an unusually important stronghold for the bats.Opening up the forestThe U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, working with The Conservation Fund, has begun forest stand improvement work across public wildlife management areas around Mark Twain Lake.