Native Bats (Pekapeka)
Our native bats are our only native land mammals. New Zealand is home to two types of bat – the long-tailed bat and the lesser short-tailed bat which are both about the size of an adult's thumb. We used to have a third type known as the greater short tailed bat but it became extinct in the 1960s.
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Photo: BD Lloyd. Short tailed bat.
In winter long tailed bats stay in their roosts and go into a “torpor” – halfway between a sleep and hibernation. They’ll will not move for up to 10 days and then all of a sudden will wake up to hunt food. They keep doing this throughout winter so they don’t waste too much energy.
Bats are nocturnal, which means they only come out at night. During the day they rest in tree hollows in old trees by themselves or in colonies of hundreds.
Long Tailed Bat Facts
• Found on the mainland, Stewart Island, Little Barrier and Great Barrier islands and Kapiti Island.
• Weighs a tiny 8-11 grams.
• Can fly up to 60 kilometres per hour.
• Feeds on small moths, mosquitoes, beetles and other flying insects.
Short Tailed Bat Facts
- Less common than the Long tailed bat.
- It is found in 13 small colonies in Northland, Little Barrier Island, Central North Island, Taranaki, Codfish Island, Nelson and Fiordland.
- Slightly bigger than it’s long tailed cousin: it weighs 12-15 grams.
- Unlike the long tailed bat it doesn’t hunt in the air. It prefers to scramble around on the ground using its folded wings like arms.
- They like to eat insects, fruit, nectar and pollen. Scientists have found they can also be pollinators of native plants, just like bees which carry pollen from flower to flower.
Seeing with sound
Bats use echolocation to hunt for food and find out where they are going. They make clicking noises, too high for humans to hear, then they listen for the echoes that bounce back off things around them. The echoes tell the bat about the location, size and identity of the objects nearby.
Why are bats so rare?
Before humans arrived in New Zealand there were millions of bats all over the country. Now they are endangered.
Chop, chop
One of the biggest problems for bats is that a lot of the trees they used to roost in were chopped down for farmlands, logging or burnt for firewood. Bats like big, old trees with holes in them like beech, totara, rimu and miro. It is important to protect the big trees we have left in areas like national parks so bats have somewhere to live.
Predators are moving in
Bats are often eaten by rats, possums, cats and stoats and some of these animals sleep or nest in the hollows in trees where bats like to live. Wasps will use the hollows to build their nests too. Predators have to be controlled in places where bats live.
