Cavechat.org

As I was walking to class this morning I found a dead bat, wouldn't be that odd if I was in a WNS affected cave except that it was dead outside on an exposed stairway in a city in February. I go to school in Syracuse, NY so I was wondering if I should send the bat to the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation, donate it to my college for education and research, or just put it in the woods to decay naturally. The bat is definitely fresh since it does not smell and is not rotting. It has some white spots on it but that might be just from road salt and not the fungus. I'm pretty sure it's a little brown bat, anyone have a good idea of where to send it?

being in NY I'd say they have seen dead bats everywhere. Bats will leave the caves and can die far afield. It might also have been living in the attic..... Do NOT give it the univ, as you have no way of knowing what diseases if any it might have. I would suggest either turning it in to your local health dept. or chucking it in the trash inside a sealed baggie. Of course, use gloves and common sense...i.e. don't bring it in your house etc.

Throw it in a ditch..........or hold a funeral.

Chads93GT wrote:Throw it in a ditch..........or hold a funeral.

I'll probably just leave the little guy in the woods somewhere in a little hole, though seeing it covered in road salt gave me an idea. Has anyone ever studied if high salinity prevents G. destructans spores from growing? Might be an idea worth testing.

I sure wouldn't touch it.

They say you have to be bit to get rabies, but there have been reports of people contracting the disease through less contact.
I would just leave it where it is.

This is a late reply, so the bat in question is probably long gone by now.
The previous advice is certainly valid, especially regarding not touching the bat, bagging it, and calling the health department.
The health department, depending on where you are, may or may not be interested. If there is no human contact they may not be at all interested.
However the Department of Natural Resources or in NY Department of Environmental Conservation may be interested to study the bat for cause of death from an epidemiological point of view, as there are other things other than WNS that can kill bats including toxic chemicals and diseases. One reason to study dead bats is for rabies surveilance.

See article in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report MAY 29, 2009, regarding 2008 case where parent picked up dead bat, took it to childs school, and sure-nuff, the bat had rabies, setting off an expensive and troublesome process...

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5820a1.htm

It seems from the article that the bat in question was a silver-haired bat as the strain of rabies found was endemic to that bat. The silver-haired bat has been implicated in many rabies cases in humans in the United States. It does not frequent caves although I noted an article stating they hibernate in the mouth of caves in the NE US. Generally it lives in forests. The cases where silver haired bat was implicated in rabies in humans was often associated with a bat getting into the house and the patient having an unidentified or untreated bite.