Meaghan Lyon is among the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey biologists who, over the past two months, “have spent many late nights surveying for bats in the Pinelands,” she noted. “Our goal … was not to capture a lot of bats, but to capture rare bats in the Myotis family.”

On the last few survey nights, the group did just that, catching two northern long-eared bats (Myotis septentrionalis) and two little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus), which are, respectively, a federally threatened…