Buzzing about bats in Waipawa backyards

A bat in the hand ... a long-tailed native bat, showing how small the species is. Photo / The Conservation Company

By Kay Griffiths

There are bats about in Waipawa. The tiny native long-tailed bat.

These bats spend their nights flitting around trees and waterways catching a meal of insects like small moths, beetles, and mosquitoes.

"If you live in Waipawa, its quite likely that these bats are foraging around your place during the hours of darkness," says Kay Griffiths of The Conservation Company.

Kay has been placing acoustic detectors, which record the sonar that bats use to navigate, around some likely looking places in Waipawa to find out if the bats are still around. "I first picked up that bats were foraging around the area last summer, in the gully that runs between the cemetery and Abbotsford Rd. The detectors showed that the bats were cruising down the gully foraging right on dusk, which is an indication that they are likely roosting close by."

Kay also received reports from locals of seeing bats on dusk and finding dead bats on a road, in a shed and also in a backyard.

Kay has followed up in the past couple of weeks and has put the detectors in more places around Waipawa and has found that there are indeed bats flying around Waipawa each and every night.

"It is pretty likely that they are also roosting during the day right in Waipawa. They mainly use cavities in trees to roost in, and at this time of year the females roost together with their young. They will each have a pup just a couple of weeks old at the moment."

The Hawke's Bay Regional Council is funding this work, which shows a great success for Hawke's Bay's biodiversity, says Mark Mitchell, the council's team leader principal adviser biosecurity biodiversity.

"It's hugely exciting to find an urban population of long-tailed bats in Hawke's Bay as the only other population living in or near a town is in Hamilton. As the regional council, we are right behind projects supporting and enhancing Hawke's Bay's biodiversity," says Mark.

Kay and her team are planning to put a tiny transmitter on one or two bats in January to be able to follow them to find out exactly which trees they are roosting in.

There are many old trees around Waipawa that may have suitable cavities so it will be good to find out which trees are being used so those trees can be protected from being cut down, and also from predators.

Bats are known to be vulnerable to predation at this time of year when roosting with the young who can't fly yet, and make a tasty meal for rats, stoats, possums and cats.