Going batty in Tuatapere

What started out as a joke aboutpossibly having bats for neighbours has turned into a reality for Tuatapere couple Maurice and Isobel Green.

As a part of Tuatapere Bioblitz in February, Environment Southland biodiversity officer Catriona Gower organised a full day of events for the community to learn more about the rich diversity of organisms (the birds, bats, insects, spiders, fish and fungi) that share their home.

Bioblitz is a scientific race against time to count as many different species in a specified area as possible, in this case,

Tuatapere on 28 Feburary, where members of the public recorded more than 240 different species.

Ahead of the day Council staff provided education on pest animals to the school children and even put up a bat detector on a retired farmer’s section – that farmer was Maurice Green.

As members of the local Lions Club, Maurice and Isobel became involved in the organisation of Bioblitz .

The Tuatapere District Lions Club also put out the offer to remove pest plants from residents’ sections – an offer that still stands.

One thing led to another and Maurice and Catriona got chatting about biodiversity.

“I was joking to her about bats because I couldn’t see there being bats here but she said she’d put the detector up on my section and see. You wouldn’t believe it when she came back and said there were bats,” he says.

A recording device hanging on a tree in the back garden picked up the sound of the critically endangered long-tailed bat (Chalinolobus tuberculatus) foraging for insects.

It was a surprising revelation for the couple, who moved to their current home in 2008, since they had never seen the creatures of the night on their 1.2 acre residential property before.

“Anybody that I’ve talked to about it says ‘oh, I’ve never seen a bat!’,” Isobel says.

“It started off as a joke and ended up as a reality,” Maurice says.

The Tuatapere area is not lacking in diversity and the Greens appreciate being able to look out on their own patch of paradise, even more so now that they know they have some special visitors from time to time.

“If it goes, it’s gone, especially the native bush. I’d hate to see it ever disappear. If that went so would all the native birds ecetera, because they rely on it,” Maurice says.

When asked to find about all the animals in the Tuatapere area, Catriona decided installing eight of the automatic detectors near where bats might forage would be a good idea as there was a variety of potential habitat for them to be spending time in.

While there was such a wide range of organisms spotted, including the endemic weta the green Maotoweta virescens, and the araliad plume moth (Pterophorus monospilalis) most people had one thing on their mind.

“I was very excited that everybody found so many different insects and everyone was super excited about the spiders but I gather everybody else was excited to discover that there’s bats flying about their area because they weren’t aware of them. It’s a beautiful forest so I’m not at all surprised we found amazing species.”

Long-tailed bats were common throughout New Zealand in the 1800s but a combination of clearance and logging of

lowland forests, clearance of trees for urban expansion and agricultural intensification and predation by introduced species all contributed to them becoming a threatened species.

“It is exciting to find evidence of bats in the area because Tuatapere has historically had a lot of logging. There’s quite a lot of weeds and pests, and there isn’t extensive pest control, so the bat population that is there has hung on.”

As an indicator species that sits at the top of the food chain, bats need healthy waterways, full of indigenous wetland marginal plants and with them the insects which live on them and in the water in order to thrive.