Rare encounters with long-tailed bats in Richmond Ranges
Thursday, 14 January 2021
When Shane Wright stepped out of a tramping hut in the Richmond Ranges in the middle of the night, he felt something swoop past his head.
At first he thought it was a morepork, but in the beam of his headlamp he saw it catch a moth and it got close enough for him to see it had a mouse-like face, no feathers and skinned wings.
“I was just completely dumbstruck, once it took the moth it just shot past the other side, it had basically done a circuit around me.”
It was at that point the University of Auckland lecturer realised he had just seen a long-tailed bat.
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“I have to say, I’ve spent my life wanting to see a bat, I have seen them at a distance on Little Barrier Island, Hauturu…but never anything like a close encounter like I had on the Richmond Ranges.”
The sightings were also the first time the critically endangered bats have been seen in that area of the Richmond Ranges in the last decade.
Wright and his wife Annette Lees were tramping through the rugged landscape from Porters Creek Hut to Starveall Hut, which is part of the Te Araroa trail, in December.
It wasn’t the only bat encounter Wright had that week. On the last night while staying at Starveall Hut, Wright said he opened the toilet door during the night and something started fluttering around, flying in and out of the toilet.
“It was chaotic because there was this thing flying right around my head real close…I was completely taken aback and surprised by that.”
Wright said it was “total luck” he had the encounters, which he chalked up as a once in a lifetime experience.
On both occasions, the bats had been feeding on an insect in the beam of his head torch.
“It was exactly the same experience and I suddenly thought, this is not a once off, these animals have actually habituated on this opportunity and they are using it.”
While bats use echolocation to navigate and find food in the dark, Wright suspected those living near the increasingly popular Te Araroa trail had learnt torchlight was likely to attract insects and therefore provide an easy meal.
Te Hoiere/Pelorus Bat Recovery Project manager Gillian Dennis said for Wright to have two sightings on one trip was “pretty amazing”.
Sightings of long-tailed bats had not previously been reported at either hut. The closest sites they had been detected during the past decade were below Browning Hut, about 5 km north of Starveall Hut and near Tophouse, about 15 km south of Porter’s Creek Hut.
“It is a fantastic encounter to have it so close, flying into his face where he could clearly see it and the second one, flying past his head.
“Not many people have that experience, people get excited just picking them up on detectors let alone seeing them up close.”
Dennis said there had also been sightings of long-tailed bats at Tophouse, Kikiwa and St Arnaud. While it was possible bats lived there, she said it was more likely they roosted in the Mt Richmond Forest Park and left the area to forage for food.
“Now we have had reports of sightings at those huts as well we are definitely keen to get detectors up there.”
Long-tailed bats, pekapeka-tou-roa, are critically endangered and are one of only two native land mammals in New Zealand. They have the same threatened status as the kākapo.
The project, a Forest & Bird initiative, aims to protect the bat population discovered at Pelorus in 2005.
The summer monitoring is now in its third season and Dennis said it hoped to run for another 10 years.
As part of the project, bats are caught and tiny radio transmitters are fitted, so they can be tracked back to their roosts. Each roost is then plotted and surveyed to see how many bats are coming and going.
In December 2019, an acoustic lure which plays bat calls, was tested at the annual volunteer barbecue for the first time, resulting in two bats being caught in a nearby harp trap.
The year before, 12 new roosting sites were discovered at the Brown River Reserve and Carluke Reserve near Rai Valley.
Dennis said the aim was to work out where the bats were roosting to determine if the pest control was being carried out in the correct areas to protect the bat population and to compare their annual survival rates.
She hoped biannual surveys could be done throughout the catchment area, including on the Nelson side, in order to determine if the population was growing or spreading.