Bat research has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my life.
I may not be the most sociable creature after dark (I love my sleep) and my night vision is terrible but working with nocturnal creatures really opens up a whole new world. A world where smell and sound are often more important than vision. A world of eyeshine and unfamiliar critters. A world where I nearly stepped on a 6.5 ft long Madagascar ground boa because I hadn’t seen her lie in the leaf litter. Having researched nocturnal lemurs for years, the transition to bats felt natural. I was used to being up at night, having to concentrate hard on ridiculously small animals, going home with the satisfaction of having learned something about them that most people with normal sleep schedules wouldn’t have had the opportunity to observe.
Things got even cooler when I got the opportunity to set up a research project to track the Critically Endangered Livingstone’s flying fox, Pteropus livingstonii, on the island of Anjouan, Comoros. Working for the NGO Dahari and in collaboration with the University of Comoros, we were able to tag two individuals with GPS trackers that we had painstakingly sewn onto handmade collars.
It was important that the collars were bespoke: that way we could ensure they fit the bats perfectly and we were able to construct them in such a way that they would fall off by themselves. There was no way we were going to catch the same individual again to take the collars off. Livingstone’s flying foxes belong to the largest bats in the world: they are very skilled at flying and, despite the myths that bats are blind, they have pretty good eyesight which makes them masters at avoiding nets that were hung in their paths.
Tracking the Critically Endangered Livingstone’s flying fox
I may not be the most sociable creature after dark (I love my sleep) and my night vision is terrible but working with nocturnal creatures really opens up a whole new world. A world where smell and sound are often more important than vision. A world of eyeshine and unfamiliar critters. A world where I nearly stepped on a 6.5 ft long Madagascar ground boa because I hadn’t seen her lie in the leaf litter. Having researched nocturnal lemurs for years, the transition to bats felt natural. I was used to being up at night, having to concentrate hard on ridiculously small animals, going home with the satisfaction of having learned something about them that most people with normal sleep schedules wouldn’t have had the opportunity to observe.
Things got even cooler when I got the opportunity to set up a research project to track the Critically Endangered Livingstone’s flying fox, Pteropus livingstonii, on the island of Anjouan, Comoros. Working for the NGO Dahari and in collaboration with the University of Comoros, we were able to tag two individuals with GPS trackers that we had painstakingly sewn onto handmade collars.
It was important that the collars were bespoke: that way we could ensure they fit the bats perfectly and we were able to construct them in such a way that they would fall off by themselves. There was no way we were going to catch the same individual again to take the collars off. Livingstone’s flying foxes belong to the largest bats in the world: they are very skilled at flying and, despite the myths that bats are blind, they have pretty good eyesight which makes them masters at avoiding nets that were hung in their paths.
Tracking the Critically Endangered Livingstone’s flying fox