Figure 1In 2019, Belgian Nils Bouillard traveled more than 9,000 miles from home to fulfill an unusual quest: to see as many bat species around the world as he could in a year. A Big Bat Year.
By Matthew L Miller
Contributing Writer
Nils Bouillard spent 2019 on one of the more unusual nature quests. He traveled the world looking for bats. Yes, bats. At one point, he was more than 9,000 miles from home.
He modeled the idea on the popular concept of the Big Year in birding, where birders attempt to see as many bird species as possible in one calendar year. Only he was looking for bat species.
Bouillard’s fascination with bats began, perhaps paradoxically, with birds. He had been getting serious about birds and exploring the local natural areas around his Belgian home. He was invited to take part in a local bat survey near the town of Chimay, a town more famous for beer than bats.
“When I saw my first bat, a gray long-eared bat, up close, I just fell in love with them,” he said. “I wanted to know everything about them.”
He noted that most bat enthusiasts were more about the creatures themselves than lists. But he found himself thinking about applying birding concepts to batting and launched the idea for his own Bat Big Year.
“There are about 1,400 species of bats on earth,” he said. “I wanted a way to educate people about this diversity and to encourage people to conserve these mammals.”
“The rules for a birding Big Year are well established,” said Bouillard. “For bats, I had to establish my own rules for what counted.”
That could prove tricky as bats are not nearly as visible as birds. Bouillard decided the following would count on his list: any bat in hand (when netted or caught by a researcher), roosting bats that could be positively identified and bat echolocation calls he recorded on a bat detector. Bats just darting by in the air can usually not be identified, so they didn’t count.
And how did Bouillard fare? He acknowledges it was harder than he thought, as finding bats on his own in unfamiliar places proved a significant challenge. The emotional toll of being away from home so frequently cost him his relationship. He felt homesick, particularly when the batting proved difficult.
As he wrote on his blog: “I also had no idea how challenging finding the bats would actually be. Trip reports make it sound easy but the reality is very different. The rules I have set myself probably didn’t help in that regard as they have cost me a number of species but I had to set some limitations and I decided to be quite stringent with them.
Still, he saw bats. Lots of bats. He traveled to 29 countries on six continents, and saw 396 species. (As a comparison, Arjan Dwarshuis’s record-breaking birding Big Year netted 6,852 species).
While Bouillard holds a slight hope someone will follow in his footsteps and perhaps break his record, he’s also realistic. “It was very challenging in every way,” he said. “And bat listing is never going to be like birding.”
Matthew L. Miller is director of science communications for The Nature Conservancy and editor of the Cool Green Science blog.
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