Working with Bats at Gaurishankar Conservation Area.

Bats belongs to order Chiroptera and the order Chiroptera consist of more than 25% of the mammalian fauna, making it species rich group of mammals in Nepal.
In Nepal Bats are recorded from the diverse range of elevations, ranging from 64m to 4154m above sea level ;(Dahal et al., 2024).

The bat I am holding is Hipposideros, this was done with full ethical guidelines during the Small Mammals Field Work in Gaurishankar Conservation Area, Dolakha. The date of the field work was on November 2023.
 

During the 3 days of continuous mist netting along the river stretch we were unable to capture a single bat, Acoustic signals were present but we were not able to capture for our research as there was presence of few holes on the mist net during the logistics handling which we couldn’t repair due to scarce of time, after finding an accessible cave in the Tamakoshi River Corridor , we used scoop nets to capture bats and relatively captured this species. And later we extracted a wing tissue using biopsy kit for the determination of the species. During the bat surveys we also clicked the pictures of bat clusters so that we can count individual bats without disruption.

We recorded the echolocation calls of different species of Bats presence on the stretch of Gaurishankar Conservation Area inside roost conditions and in flight conditions for contributions on Global Bat Call Library and Nepal Bat Call Library.

Small Mammals of order Chiroptera need to be further studied in Nepal as it is one of the very less discussed topic even though it occupies a diverse ecological niche, contributing to pollination, seed dispersal and controlling insects population also Bats are one of the most important misunderstood animals.