To Bat or Not to Bat

It’s 10:30pm, my fellow bat scientist is curled up in a rice sack trying to stay warm, the guide is huddled at the base of a tree keeping a look out. I check the time, gather up my gloves, head torch and bat bags. Two minutes later I am walking, not for the first time, into the first net. After removing my self and checking the net is now actually empty, I continue to the next net. This one is gently moving, there is a bat in it. As I approach I realise it is not just any bat, it’s a Centurio senex, one of the rarer bats caught in the park and the first one of the season.

Photo by Esteban Esquivois

Cusuco National park is home to 59 species of bats and during June and July this year I also got to call it home. There were five camps open this year Base Camp, Buenos Aires, Cantiles, El Danto and Guanales, each camp has a unique composition of bat species and varying amounts of rain.

El Danto was my favourite satellite camp with several species of nectivorous, insectivorous and frugivorus bats as well as Trachops cirrhosus, a species that eats frogs. The camp was affected by a hurricane in 2020 and is suffering the effects of land use change so the data collected from the  monitoring project here can be used to understand and track changes to the local environment. Bats are not the only indicator species that the bat team studies, the ectoparasites present on bats can be used to study host health and environmental change. The added bonus of this study in Honduras is that it is a collaboration with the Fungi team who are studying the hyperparasitic fungi that grow on bat flies.

Photo by Danni Gilroy

It was a privilege to be part of the bat team. There is nothing better than getting back at 1:00am from a survey to a bucket shower under moonlight, accompanied by the calls of crested owls, then curling up in my hammock to drift off to sleep.

Title photo by Harry Edwards