Mammals of the South-West Pacific and Moluccan Islands

"These are the islands north of Australia but this book excludes New Guinea because they’d already done a book on that. There’s a chain of islands that stretches towards the US and South America. Bats have spread from island to island to island a long time ago and, as they arrived, they evolved into separate species, so there are a lot of endemic bat species on these islands that have grown up there for thousands of years. The Australian naturalist who produced this book has spent his life looking at these mammals, especially bats. I’ve been over to the Solomon Islands to look at the problems that endemic species encounter, and found many species are seriously threatened with extinction. Sudden changes to the environment can easily cause extinction and man keeps changing the environment. I started being interested in wildlife when I was a boy and started looking at mammals in my own area of Northamptonshire. When I started to study bats I found there was just nothing known about them so I began looking, and it got more and more interesting. From that point on I concentrated on bats, watching bats and chasing bats around the world. They have got a lot of intelligence. They can’t do their times tables. Yes. That’s very true with bats. There are a number of parallels between the way bats live and the way humans live. Reproduction, for example. Generally bats have one offspring at a time and it can be three years until they produce another one. It’s a similar rate of reproduction as humans. So, they put a lot of energy into rearing that single youngster. Mice will have four or five at a time three or four times a year. They don’t have that connection with their young that bats do, so bats have a different social network. It’s difficult to know how to measure grief. You can’t see facial expressions, but their actions indicate that they are searching for their lost one. They certainly have a very complex lifestyle. There are so many parallels between us — the way they find their roost, the way they house themselves. Certainly some that I’ve ringed and kept in touch with for 15 or 20 years become like old friends and they don’t seem to mind being handled. Maybe they put up with you because they know it’s not going to hurt, based on their past experiences of the same event. We do. We have pet names for certain bats and certainly, if they get brought in injured then they get a pet name. We’ve got a little Daubenton’s bat in captivity at the moment and she’s just called Dauby, which is a bit bland, but once you get attached to them then it’s not very nice if they do die so we try and remain a bit more remote. But we do a lot of work on conservation of the species. A lot of that is working with people like you, trying to get them to learn to live with the wildlife in their homes, not to get rid of the bats from their house and to become more adjusted to the wildlife they live with. Well, nature is a rich tapestry. November 20, 2010. Updated: April 7, 2024 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."