Donation by ZWG Zuid-Holland
February 27, 2012
The Dutch Mammal Working Group Zuid-Holland donates € 2,000.- for the project Bats and forest management in Belarus. We use the money to buy bat detectors for the Belarusian bat workers.
The goal of the project is to get more people working on bats and their conservation in Belarus and to teach them new survey techniques. In Belarus only 5 to 10 people carry out bat research. That is a small number if you compare it to the several hundred in the Netherlands. Belarus is five times bigger than the Netherlands. The Belarusians mainly carry out counts of bats in their hibernacula (winter resting sites). Where the animals stay during summer or how they use the landscape is unknown. That is why in the summer of 2012 The Habitat Foundation, in collaboration with the Bat working group of APB-BirdLife Belarus, gives two workshops about research and conservation of bats in forests.
Research on bats in summer relies heavily on the use of bat detectors, a kind of radios that make the ultrasonic sounds of bats audible for humans. As far as known only one bat detector is available in the whole of Belarus. So, if the participants of the workshops want to bring their knowledge into practice, more bat detectors are needed. With the donation of the Mammal Working Group Zuid-Holland we can buy some bat detectors. We will give them to the Bat working group of APB-BirdLife Belarus. If somebody needs a bat detector for a survey or research he can borrow it from the Bat working group.