In the spring of 2018 in my second year of university I was fortunate enough to spend two weeks in the Algarve in Portugal, studying Lesser Horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus hipposideros) in a small rural village. At dawn and dusk our research team would study the emergence of the lesser horseshoes from their roost, counting emergence numbers and studying their roost sites with bat detectors set to the frequency of their echolocations.
The main roost was in an abandoned dinosaur-themed nightclub (I guess it's not strange to the bats) and we were lucky enough to be able to go into the roost during the daytime to make a floor plan and identify entrances and exits to the roost. We were incredibly careful not to disturb the bats.
In Portugal, there was an economic crash between 2010-2014, and many of the houses in this village were half built and abandoned by their owners, as they were being built as holiday homes. It was clear in 2018 that these homes were perfect roosting sites for a healthy population of lesser horseshoe bats and pipistrelles (as well as swallows and martins), but I wonder as the economy recovers if these bats are now under more threat than ever. As levels of light pollution increase and people start to return to their holiday homes, I worry that bat populations will decline.
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