Wanted: bat men and women

Forest and Bird is looking for bat men and bat women - not to fight crime, but to help discover more about bat populations in the top of the South Island.

The conservation organisation has received funding from an anonymous benefactor to help it survey populations of the winged mammals during the next five summers.

Forest and Bird regional field officer Debs Martin said the funding was exciting. Little was known about the nocturnal creatures, which were nationally endangered.

Ms Martin said despite dark stereotypes of bats in literature, New Zealand's only native land mammal was small and incredibly cute.

"They won't bite you or suck your blood."

They were relatively small and a baby bat would fit in the palm of your hand.

Ms Martin said sightings of bats had been documented around the region, including at Pelorus Bridge, in the St Arnaud and Buller areas, in Kahurangi National Park and in the Marlborough Sounds.

"We don't know how many there are, but they are in decline. They've gone from a lot of places around New Zealand, and we do know that some of that is human-induced."

She said New Zealand had two kinds of bats - long-tailed and short-tailed. The latter were more endangered, with a population in Kahurangi National Park the only known one in the Nelson region.

Bats liked living in limestone bluff areas and in forested areas near open spaces, and fed on insects.

Unlike their European and Australian counterparts, New Zealand bats roosted in crevices in trees and did not hang from branches, she said.

Part of the project would also be educational in raising awareness about bats, she said.

As part of the research, volunteers would be asked to go out at night to find bats with the aid of bat detection boxes, which picked up the clicking sound of bats echolocating.

Through emitting short and intense pulses of ultrasound and interpreting these sounds to navigate their environment, bats were able to "see" at night, she said.

Ms Martin said the greatest threats to bats were predation from rats, stoats and wild cats, and habitat destruction.

She said the study would hopefully provide more information about numbers of bats, where they lived in the top of the south and what was contributing to their decline.

- © Fairfax NZ News