Every month, the Karioi Project shares ways we’re working together with our community to protect biodiversity – our native birds, forests, and coastlines – keeping Whāingaroa thriving. As the sun dips behind Mount Karioi, bats come alive. Thanks to recent acoustic monitoring, their secret night-time world is being revealed across local farms.
Over recent months we’ve confirmed pekapeka-tou-roa (long-tailed bats) on a bunch of properties around the Karioi landscape. These tiny native bats hunt insects at night above streams and sheltering bush and are rarely seen. But thanks to the care and commitment of local landowners, they are still here. On these properties are wetlands, remnant bush and stream margins that shelter threatened native species, including pekapeka-tou-roa (long-tailed bats) and matuku hūrepo (Australasian bittern).
Many landowners have spent years fencing waterways, planting natives and protecting kahikatea stands, often long before anyone talked about biodiversity outcomes. Now they are beginning to see the results of all their hard work, with wildlife slowly returning to the places where it once thrived.
This summer, we’ve been using acoustic bat monitors. Our native bats are tiny, so we detect them by recording their ultrasonic calls at night. Deploying the monitors has become a real community effort – farmers have driven us across paddocks and into hard-to-reach places just to help place a small recorder, and children from Matapihi Kindergarten were delighted to help us set one up and learn what it was listening for.
When we later confirmed they had bats, the response was genuine excitement. For some people, it’s the first time they’ve known bats were there at all – the reward after years of caring for their land.
We’re now working with willing landowners to extend landscape-scale pest control – adding possum, mustelid and feral cat control to help protect these habitats.
Biodiversity is being restored across our rural landscape, led by the people who know and love this land well.
This article is proudly supported by Raglan Boat Charters.
