Chapter 4: No Change in Status

The third item on the agenda was bats.

Carrie Bell sat where she always sat for the quarterly program review, at the corner of the conference table nearest the door, where she could see everyone’s face and the screen at the same time. The room was on the second floor of the division’s central office, a brick and glass building in an office park off a numbered route, between a dental billing company and a retention pond that belonged to nobody. The carpet was the color of oatmeal. The coffee was from a machine that took a long time and produced something the machine itself seemed unsure about. On the wall hung a framed photograph of a bald eagle that had been there longer than anyone in the room had worked there.

The bat item took eleven minutes. A federal grant for white-nose monitoring had come through at eighty percent of the request, which everyone treated as good news, because it was. Then loons. A volunteer coordinator’s report on nesting rafts, read aloud by Roy Ferland, the assistant director for field operations, in the voice of a man reading the phone book to a child he loved. Two rafts vandalized, one by weather and one by persons unknown, probably teenagers, possibly the weather again. Then a culvert. Carrie took notes on her agency phone with the sound off. Her personal phone lay face down beside it. She had learned years ago, at a newspaper that no longer existed, that a face-down phone tells a room you are paying attention, and that paying attention is mostly a thing you tell a room.

Miriam Sloane ran the meeting the way she ran everything, which is to say it did not appear to be run at all. Things simply happened in order and did not run long. Miriam sat at the head of the table with her paper notebook open and a pen she rarely used, her silver bob exact, her hands folded on the table when she was not writing. She was fifty-seven and looked it, on purpose, the way a stone wall looks its age on purpose. When she wanted an item closed she said “good” with no lift at the end of the word, and the item closed.

“Snake Island,” Miriam said. “Evan’s on the line.”

The speaker in the middle of the table crackled and produced Evan Thayer’s voice, tinny and fifteen or twenty minutes away at the East Quabbin Field Station, saying good morning to the room in general. The room said good morning back in the ragged way rooms do.

“Go ahead,” Miriam said.

Evan went ahead. Carrie had heard him give field reports for six years, and she could tell within one sentence what kind of report it would be. This was the good kind. He kept his voice level because he always kept his voice level, but the sentences came a little faster than usual and there were more of them.

Spring emergence at the primary den complex had been strong. On one morning the second week of April, staff had counted forty-one individuals on the ledge before noon, the best single-morning count in the program’s history. Body conditions looked good coming out of winter. Site fidelity looked good. One animal, a female designated 2019-F-11, had been documented at the same overwintering crevice for the third consecutive April, which he said mattered more than it sounded like it mattered, and then explained why, which took a minute and a half. A second female, whose transmitter had gone dead over the winter, had been visually confirmed alive, so the loss was equipment, not animal. His colleague had also photographed two individuals not recorded in two seasons and presumed lost. Presumed wrongly, as it turned out.

“So the estimate goes up,” Roy said.

“The confidence interval tightens,” Evan said. “The estimate was probably always right. Now we know it better.”

Nobody at the table wrote any of this down except Carrie, who wrote all of it down, because that was the difference between her job and theirs.

The fiscal analyst, a quiet man from the third floor whose name Carrie could never hold onto for more than a week, asked about the dead transmitter. Evan said the unit ran about eleven hundred dollars and that replacement was in the existing equipment line, no supplemental needed. The fiscal analyst made a small note and was happy, or whatever the third floor had instead.

“Off-island observations,” Miriam said. It was a standing question and she asked it the way you ask whether the doors are locked.

“Nothing verified,” Evan said. “The portal’s had its usual spring. Garter snakes, a milk snake in Hardwick somebody was very sure about, one water snake photographed from a respectful distance. Nothing that holds up.”

“Good,” Miriam said, with no lift at the end.

“One more thing for the record,” Evan said. “There was an accompanied site visit mid-month. My girlfriend. She’s a licensed veterinarian, she was interested in the animals’ condition, and I cleared it through the office beforehand. I logged it under professional outreach.”