At-risk ‘fiesty’ bats find a safe haven in Pureora Forest

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Bat monitoring in the Pureroa Forest has been deemed a success by conservation experts.

Tony McDonald/Supplied

Bat monitoring in the Pureroa Forest has been deemed a success by conservation experts.

Walking into a dark forest full of bats might be a bit too spooky for most people, but for Department of Conservation (DOC) staff working in the Pureora Forest it’s an exciting and rewarding task.

The 2023 round of pekapeka (short-tailed bat) monitoring has just been completed in the Pureora Forest, a biodiversity hotspot and a key location for the native mammals, which are classified as “at risk – declining” and described by one tagger as “unique and very feisty”.

The Pureora Forest is about 40km north-west of Taupō and about the same distance south-east of Tokoroa.

DOC’s bat monitoring information will be used to give an estimate of population survival and gauge the effectiveness of predator control programmes in the area.

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DOC technical advisor Tertia Thurley said this year’s capturing and tagging of more than 200 pekepeka marked a successful week in a favourable weather window.

The bat monitoring work involved setting up harp traps which, as their name suggests, look like harps with bags beneath them and capture the bats unharmed.

The Pureora Forest work involved a team of 27 people, with 18 carrying out the capture and tagging of the animals, and nine others acting as observers.

Bats already tagged were let go, ones that weren’t tagged were put into special bags and taken to a central area where a PIT tag was inserted.

These PIT tags – the same sort of device used to microchip dogs – are used to individually identify bats as they fly in and out of known roosts. The roosts are equipped with aerials which can read the tag number and store this information along with the date and time.

“We tagged 219 bats over three nights, surpassing our target of 200, and catching a good mix of juveniles and adults, males and females,” Thurley said.

“During and after the tagging period – between 24 January and 10 February – the bat loggers were operating at roost entrances.”

Thurley said 788 individual tagged bats were detected, comprising animals tagged in previous years and newly tagged specimens captured this year.

“I’m confident there are many more bats out there than the ones we tagged,” Thurley said.

Pureora-based biodiversity ranger Troy McDonald, who contributed to the tagging work, describes the bats as “beautiful, incredibly unique and very feisty”.

“This Pureora population of pekapeka may be small in comparison to other Aotearoa populations, but they are unique because it is only here, they have been photographed feeding on and pollinating dactylanthus, a native parasitic plant also known as wood rose,” he said.

“I feel very lucky to not only have finally seen these amazing animals up close, but also having handled, processed and released them,” he said.

Short-tailed bats are threatened by predation from ship rats, stoats, possums, cats – as well as habitat fragmentation and modification. The Pureora population has been supported and protected through consistent predator control in the forest, including treatments with 1080.

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