Guess where the fieldwork site was today?

 

Mangroves!! After walking through the bush (having to cut our way through some areas as the guide lost the path!), we made it to the beach/mudflats. From here we could visualise some active bats above the mangroves. This camp of flying foxes appears to move between roosting trees more frequently than other areas I have visited. From the questionnaires I learnt that at least once a month people are in the mangroves fishing or hunting wild pigs - I suspect this is why they move so much. With the amount of activity from this camp I was concerned maybe someone was already there causing disturbance- thankfully not the case.

 

After slipping, sliding, tripping and stubbed toes we made it to a collection of roosting trees. Rather than 50-100 in a tree as I have seen previously they were in small groups of 5-20 per tree. 

 

Looking at the leaves of the young tees we determined which sites are frequented more than the others (some leaves were so black with old faeces you could hardly see they were green). Using an old sulu (sarong) we made ties to hang the sheets above the seedlings to decrease the disturbance to the plants (sorry photos of this won’t upload). Fingers crossed the collection tomorrow morning is successful and the bats return to the same patch of trees!