Building Community Skills to Monitor Rodney’s Pekapeka

Community leaders and Council staff gathered at Coatesville Hall on Friday 14 August to learn how acoustic monitoring can help us better understand and protect New Zealand’s long-tailed bats, pekapeka.

The workshop, led by The Forest Bridge Trust Ecologist Dr Virginia Moreno, brought together 13 participants from community groups and organisations across Rodney and Kaipara.

Organised by Auckland Council’s Cheryl Krull, the workshop was designed to build local knowledge and capability around pekapeka | long-tailed bat monitoring. Participants included representatives from Tākatū Landcare, Mahu West Pest, Rodney West, Restore Rodney East and Auckland Council.

The aim was simple but important: to give communities the skills and confidence to organise their own bat monitoring projects.

Rather than relying on one person to set up acoustic recorders, download hundreds or even thousands of recordings and process the data, communities can develop the skills to carry out more of this work themselves.

From recording bats to understanding the data

Virginia introduced participants to the different types of acoustic monitoring equipment used to detect pekapeka and demonstrated how to set up AR5 acoustic recorders for bat surveys.

But collecting recordings is only the beginning.

A single recorder can produce thousands of audio files, creating a significant amount of data to work through. Participants learned how to use software including BatSearch and AviaNZ to process recordings and identify bat calls.

They also learned how to read the resulting sonograms, visual representations of sound and interpret the information gathered from monitoring sites.

For many participants, this was one of the most valuable parts of the workshop: learning not just how to collect data, but how to turn that data into meaningful information about where bats are present and how they are using the landscape.

Getting hands-on with bat detector technology

The afternoon took a more practical turn when participants had the opportunity to build their own mini-Griff bat detectors, under the guidance of Chris Burton and Sarah Mikkelsen from Community Waitākere.

Building the small detectors proved to be quite a challenge.

The circuit boards are tiny, requiring participants to use tweezers to position miniature transistors and resistors before carefully soldering them into place. It was a great reminder that the technology behind acoustic monitoring is far from simple, and that there is plenty to learn before heading out into the field!

Building a network of local knowledge

Workshops like this are about more than learning how to use specialist equipment. They are about building capability within communities and sharing knowledge.

Pekapeka are difficult to monitor because they are nocturnal and highly mobile, making acoustic monitoring an important tool for understanding their presence and distribution.

By supporting community groups in developing their own monitoring skills, more people can help gather information about these threatened native mammals across the landscape.

For The Forest Bridge Trust, working alongside community groups and partners to build this knowledge is an important part of our wider conservation work. The more communities understand the species living in their own backyards, the better placed they are to help protect them.

A big thank you to everyone who took part, and to Cheryl Krull, Virginia Moreno, Chris Burton and Sarah Mikkelsen for helping make the day such a valuable learning experience.

Together, we can continue Connecting People and the Land – and build a deeper understanding of the precious species that share our landscape.