06/06/2026
🦇Love bats? Volunteer with us!
We are looking for volunteers to help monitor bats in two locations in Ireland.
📈The main aim of Bat Conservation Ireland is to help conserve Irish bats. In order to ensure Irish bats are being conserved it is important to find out if their populations are increasing, decreasing or stable.
📊Regular monitoring is the key to picking up any declining (or increasing) trends, which are in turn, important in forming conservation policy and management on a nationwide and EU level. BCIreland manages five schemes to track trends in bat populations.
🦇The annual population trends of common pipistrelles, soprano pipistrelles and Leisler's bats are assessed every year by driven surveys across the island of Ireland. Along 28 pre-mapped routes, teams of two people drive slowly and use bat detectors to record the bats along roadsides twice in July and August. In order to derive reliable trends the same routes are driven year after year.
🔦We need new volunteer teams in Meath and Fermanagh to help cover these two routes so that we can find out how their populations are doing.
🦇No experience is needed, we provide training and we analyse the bat sounds afterwards to identify what bats were present.
🏡If you live in either of these two areas, you have the use of a car, you have a couple of evenings free in July and August, and have a willing team mate to help please get in touch!
For more information please email: [email protected]
Thanks to support from National Parks and Wildlife Service & Northern Ireland Environmental Agency.
📸 Tina Aughney
