She’s completely batty . . .
in the best way possible
Staff writer
Natalie McLinden sat at the dinner table in her in-laws’ home on Yarrow Rd. in rural Marion.
In one hand she brandished a silver, boxy device — a bat detector.
“It doesn’t attract them,” McLinden said. “It’s like a trail cam almost. But instead of pictures, it collects sounds.”
McLinden is a graduate student at Kansas State University studying the bat population in the Flint Hills.
On the table before her was a glass box holding five different bat specimens.
All were in perfect condition, despite some being collected more than a century ago.
McLinden attended Haven High School, just south of Hutchinson.
“I always wanted to work with animals, but growing up, I didn’t realize that there was anything other than a vet,” McLinden said.
That changed when she became an undergraduate.
While attending the University of Wyoming, she discovered the wildlife biology major and decided conservation was her calling.
With Wyoming’s famous national parks and natural beauty, she wasn’t sure she would return to Kansas.
“Then I started to miss my family,” McLinden said.
She married Jarret McLinden in October 2024 and moved in with him and his family at their ranch near Marion.
She is not far from her own family in Reno County.
Kansas provided a new means for McLinden to pursue a career in conservation.
“Everyone wants to work out west with bears and mountains and elk, but being able to see the little cool critters that call the prairie home, I was like, ‘I could work here,’” she said. “I definitely have fallen in love with the Flint Hills. I’ll go with [Jarret] to put out mineral, and he gets annoyed because instead of helping him, I’ll flip rocks over to try to find little snakes and lizards.”
Until recently she was not picky about what animals she worked with. She collared moose in Colorado and surveyed jumping mice at Konza Biological Station near Manhattan.
Then, last summer, McLinden received an email from Andrew Pope, a Manhattan-based biologist.
Pope had a position open for a graduate student to do research on bats. Would she be interested?
McLinden was.
Since then, she has spent seven months researching when and where bats appear in Kansas.
“We know they’re around, but we don’t know exactly when they come out of hibernation or migrate into the state and when they go back out,” McLinden said. “Basically all the bat research that’s been done has been in the eastern states like Missouri and Arkansas, where there’s a lot of caves and trees. We don’t really know how they’re using the prairie.”
Her bat detector has been key.
“It’s ultrasonic,” she said. “None of the bats in Kansas you can really hear with your naked ear. … You put this on a 10-foot hole, and bats will fly around, and it’ll pick up their calls and you can identify them.”
Bats gather around water and trees; her detector has picked up many by a pond in her husband’s pasture.
There are eastern red bats, whose calls “go up and down and all around”; silver-haired bats, whose calls are “lower and flatter”; and myotises, whose calls are the highest-pitched of all.
McLinden is trying to gather information to help preserve species like northern long-eared, little brown, tricolored, or hoary bats, each of which are either endangered or close to being classified as such.
“We’re trying to figure out how many trees is enough, because obviously you don’t want trees out here,” she said.
McLinden eventually wants to become state biologist in Marion County, a job now held by Jeff Rue.
“Unfortunately, he’s younger and likes his job,” she joked.
Until then, living on a ranch in the county has helped a surprising amount with K-State conservation work.
“One hard part about working with wildlife in Kansas is the fact that like 90% of our land is privately owned, so it takes a lot of outreach,” she said. “Being married to a rancher helps. I’m from this world.”