Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:57 and sunset is 6:28, for 11 hours 32 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1846, Wisconsin’s first state constitutional convention meets:
The convention sat until December 16, 1846. The Convention was attended by 103 Democrats and 18 Whigs. The proposed constitution failed when voters refused to accept several controversial issues: an anti-banking article, a homestead exemption (which gave $1,000 exemption to any debtor), providing women with property rights, and black suffrage. The following convention, the Second Constitutional Convention of Wisconsin in 1847-48, produced and passed a constitution that Wisconsin still very much follows today.
Beatrice Lawrence reports on a dance of 3,000 bats:
It was 4 a.m. and dark. J. Paul White greeted about 20 people. He’s the bat program lead at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ Bureau of Natural Heritage Conservation.
“There must be a lot of birders here, you guys are ready to go,” White whispered.
The group found their seats and waited quietly for the show to start. As the sun slowly rose, we started to see the bats — dancing.
This field trip to Nelson Dewey State Park was organized by the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, a nonprofit that works to protect the state’s lands, waters and wildlife. This particular group camped out to see the Stonefield colony of little brown bats as they emerged to feed at sunset.
We were also there to witness the bats’ return as a swarm at dawn: all 3,000 of them.
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According to Redell, the state of Wisconsin plays an especially important role for little brown bats in the U.S. Nearly half of little brown bats in the country hibernate in just a few Wisconsin mines.
Little brown bats are endangered in the U.S. Like many species of hibernating bats, their population has been threatened by a fungal infection called White Nose Syndrome. But in recent years, Wisconsin’s little brown bats have shown signs of recovery.
See Beatrice Lawrence, A Dance of 3,000 bats: Watching the Morning Swarm at Nelson Dewey State Park (‘Each year, the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin organizes hundreds of trips to get people in touch with the natural world and show them conservation projects — like bat monitoring — in action’), Wisconsin Public Radio, October 2, 2025.
Can Owls Turn Their Heads 360 Degrees?: