‘We’ve got bats’: The community bringing New Zealand’s pekapeka into the spotlight

Billy Mclean knew nothing about bats. As a lifelong Kiwi, there was no reason for him to.

Unlike in neighboring Australia and other parts of Oceania whose renowned flying foxes grow meter-long wingspans, Aotearoa New Zealand is famous for its birds, not bats.

Mclean worked as an arborist in the Franklin area, an agricultural county south of Auckland on the North Island. He said he felt he knew everything about the local forest, until one night 23 years ago.

As he headed home from a nighttime walk on his property, a shadow swooped from the arched tree canopy. He ducked — all his years spent in the trees, and he had never seen anything move like it.

Mclean said it took a minute to register what he had seen. “As the picture develops, you get that classic crescent-shaped wing,” he told Mongabay by phone. “That’s when I knew. We’ve got bats.”

That night sparked a passion for bats that Mclean has been pursuing ever since. After years of being “straight-up ridiculed” for trying to convince his community that these creatures lived in their backyards, many are starting to believe him.

Today, he’s an active member with Finding Franklin Bats (FFB), a locally run research project teaching community members how to find, monitor and protect the overlooked bats that live in their backyards.

Unlike New Zealand’s famous kiwi (genus Apteryx) and takahē (Porphyrio hochstetteri), bats aren’t flashy or feathered. They’re elusive and tiny: “chicken nugget-sized,” Ben Paris, a senior conservation adviser for the Auckland City Council, told Mongabay over a Zoom call.

While small, they’re significant. Bats, or pekapeka in Te Reo Māori, the country’s official Indigenous language, are taonga, meaning they’re recognized as significant “treasure” species. They appear in Māori stories and sacred face tattoos, known as tā moko.

Two species — the New Zealand long-tailed bat (Chalinolobus tuberculatus) and the New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat (Mystacina tuberculata) — are the country’s only known native land mammals still around today. (A third species, the New Zealand greater short-tailed bat, Mystacina robusta, hasn’t been recorded since 1967 and is likely extinct.) These last two are also at risk of extinction: lesser short-tailed bats are classified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, while long-tailed bats as considered critically endangered. Both are primarily threatened by deforestation, which carves up their habitats into shrinking islands in a sea of developed farmland. This leaves their roosts more vulnerable to predation by invasive possums, stoats and feral cats.

And while both species are protected under the country’s Wildlife Act, bats are frequently killed because rural landowners don’t know to check for bat roosts before felling trees.

Zion Flavell is a part of Ngāti te ata, a Māori iwi, or tribe, from the surrounding Auckland region. He joined Finding Franklin Bats in 2023.

“I heard the stories of the tā moko, but it didn’t click,” he told Mongabay over video call. As bat populations have decreased, Flavell said, many people in the surrounding Franklin area aren’t aware that fragmented populations of long-tailed bats live on local properties. There are several reasons for that.

“There is very little research done on pekapeka,” said Grant Temporo, a senior research officer within the University of Waikato’s Environmental Research Institute. He told Mongabay over Zoom that the country’s Department of Conservation (DOC), which oversees much of the endangered species research, is limited in scope and funding outside of the national parks it manages.

“So you have all these small, fragmented [bat] populations that are hanging on, but no one studies,” Temporo said. For that reason, the overarching state of New Zealand’s bats “is just a big unknown.”

Outside of the DOC and universities’ research, private contractors have historically been the sole monitors of bats, primarily at the mandated request of developers prior to construction on public land. The results of their monitoring rarely make it back to the community, though, according to FFB members.

Altogether, this means bats are “just not on the radar for New Zealanders,” Paris said.

When Auckland City Council members first expressed interest in doing an initial bat population survey in Franklin, Paris knew it would be very difficult because most bats live on private property.

“Auckland council isn’t very popular with rural landowners,” he said. “We’re seen as an authority that’s going to come and change things on their land.”

In 2022, Paris suggested an alternative: that the initial survey be spearheaded by volunteer community members and researchers from EcoQuest, a local field station for U.S. university students.