Page 64 - Thola Issue 17

62 Bat Interest Group of KZN
ENCHANTING
CREATURES
Eleanor Richardson reports on twenty enlightening and informative years of ‘batting’ in KwaZulu-Natal.
Twenty years seems to have gone by
so fast! When we began the bat group in 1994 as a sub-group of the Durban Natural Science Museum Friends Society, we had no idea how far we would go. We began as the Durban Bat Interest Group but by 2004, we realised we had to grow up to become the Bat Interest Group of KwaZulu-Natal (or Bats KZN, as most people call us).
From the start, we aimed to tell people about bats and their importance to our environment, to try and conserve the bats we knew about, and to find out more about the bats we did not know about.
We have certainly spoken to
people: over the years, we have logged over 4 500 ‘contacts’ with members
of the public – helping people with
the bats in their roofs or gardens,
with school projects, with talks to interested groups, and with roost visits. Our training courses have been well attended, especially the ‘Introduction to Bats’ workshops at Shongweni, which have run annually for 17 years, and the ‘Bats In Roofs’ workshops (aimed mainly at the pest control industry), which have run for 13 years. We have also run four specialised bat rehabilitation workshops and three bat detector workshops.
Our book, Bats In Roofs, evolved from the need to have the information from the workshop in an easily understood form, and was published
in 2007. We have also produced a ‘Bats of Durban’ poster and numerous brochures on bat exclusion, general bat information, and bats in gardens.
Our rehabilitation programme to offer help to grounded and wounded bats has seen over 950 bats cared
for, released back into the wild where possible, or kept in a sanctuary where it wasn’t possible. We have successfully reunited many baby bats with their mothers – always the happiest time for
BELOW: Dr Leigh Richards explains the finer points of bat identification to an engrossed group at our annual training day held at Shongweni Dam.
FAR RIGHT: Long-fingered bats (Miniopterus natalensis) fly around members of the team during a visit to Ntsizwe mine in the Eastern Cape.
thola: VOLUME 17. 2014/15