It’s not clear how many long-tailed bats are left, but when dusk falls, rural properties near Waiuku, on Auckland’s southern border, become a pekapeka-tou-roa hotspot.
“We don’t really understand a lot about them,” said Auckland Council senior conservation advisor Ben Paris. “The more we’ve looked, the more we’ve seemed to find them, which is great.”
Now, researchers are studying the bats as part of a five-year tracking project involving Auckland Council and local iwi Ngāti Te Ata Waiohua, along with community groups and EcoQuest Education Foundation.
Setup begins in the hours before sundown – the New Zealand long-tailed bats are stopped in their tracks when they hit harp nets as they emerge from their roosts inside and under the bark of large trees.
Once they’ve been caught, small radio trackers are glued to their backs. The pekapeka are then monitored as they’re released back to other roosts in an effort to understand more about their movements and behaviour.
Researchers also want to find out if the bats can serve as natural pest control, eating bugs that affect local crops. That’s because many of the bats in the area live on rural properties, surrounded by farms and pasture.
“We’re looking to see whether these bats – which eat tiny little mosquitoes and moths and beetles and things like that – could be a real useful agricultural tool for farmers,” Paris said.
Learning how to keep them alive is another key focus.
“The man threats to the long-tailed bat is that there’s not enough of these big old trees,” Paris said, pointing to one of the bat roosts. “The other thing is the predators like the ship rats, the possums, the mustelids, the cats – they’re really sitting ducks when they’re in the roosts here.”
There’s no shortage of volunteers helping out, including Ngāti Te Ata Waiohua’s Zion Flavell, who’s learning to become a bat handler.
“It’s the same thing as like your driver’s licence,” he explained.
“You get your learners, your restricted, and you get your full. I’m currently a learner. I’m gonna get my restricted – hopefully this season – so that I can handle pekapeka just on my own.”
Paris said he wants Kiwis to be better informed about the native species.
“My hope is that more people will have conversations about bats, because most New Zealanders don’t even know we have long-tailed bats, let alone any other bats.”
