The rare bats that helped spark a conservation movement

14:24Iroro Tanshi:See how you can do your part at arborday.org slash NPR. Since 1970, North America has lost more than a quarter of its bird population. Billions of birds, gone, everywhere from backyards to national parks. But some species are making a comeback. Raptors, for example, like eagles and falcons, have seen their numbers grow by more than 200 % since crashing a few decades ago. In a new book, ornithologist Scott Wiedensahl follows the people working to bring back some of the most threatened species on the planet. He traveled from Ukraine to Colorado and many places in between, writing about bird species that are recovering.

15:07Iroro Tanshi:His book is called The Return of the Oyster Catcher, and its namesake is one of those success stories. They're increasingly common on Atlantic shores, rearing their blackheads and fiery eyes, chittering away as they sift for oysters with their long, bright orange bills.

15:29Iroro Tanshi:That sound is from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, by the way, a free and public treasure trove of sound and data about birds. Scott Wiedensahl told Peter O'Dowd the oyster catcher's comeback is a conservation success story.

15:43Scott Weidensaul:The scientists that were working on oyster catcher recovery realized if they could increase the productivity of each nest by an average of half a chick per nest, per pair per year, they could turn what had been this really steep decline in oyster catchers into an equally steep recovery. And that's exactly what they did starting in about 2008. And in the year since then, the oyster catcher population, which had been falling like 10 or 15 percent a decade, reversed. And we've seen about a 45 percent increase since 2008. There's now about 15 ,000 oyster catchers up and down the Atlantic coast. They've recolonized way up into New England.

16:20Scott Weidensaul:I'm in New Hampshire. They're now relatively common along the coast of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, places where they hadn't been seen in some cases for the better part of a century.

16:30Iroro Tanshi:You write a lot about birds of prey, raptors and eagles, even vultures. I didn't realize how intensely people around the world have hunted those animals, many to the brink of extinction. What problem do people have with raptors and eagles and vultures?

16:46Scott Weidensaul:Competition. You know, they were seen as competition for food. They were seen as competition for game. You know, they were shot by the thousands, by the tens of thousands over the years. I mean, for a while, there was actually a bounty on bald eagles in Alaska because they were seen as a competitor for salmon. We've come a long way since then.

17:05Iroro Tanshi:You do write a lot about vultures. I keep coming back to that because I find it so interesting that you – the challenge, I think, is how do you get people to care about a vulture? They're nowhere near as cute as like a puffin or even like an oyster catcher. So you conservationists, you have to like turn public opinion back in favor of an animal that a lot of people see as a nuisance or as a threat or as competition as you describe. Right.

17:31Scott Weidensaul:Although we know in places like South Asia where vulture populations crash by more than 98 % because people were using an analgesic on their livestock that's incredibly toxic. Once those vulture populations collapsed, there were serious health problems for humans. The number of feral dogs went up. The number of rabies cases went up dramatically. Conservation organizations do not put vultures out there as the face of their fundraising campaign. But scavenging birds like vultures are among the most endangered groups of birds in the world.

18:04Iroro Tanshi:We should talk about rewilding. You have a stirring example of rewilding from the United Kingdom. And I want you to tell us what that is. But first, I want to play some more sound. This is the call of a nightingale, again, from the Cornell Lab.

18:23Iroro Tanshi:So there's this sanctuary in the UK. It's known as the Nepp Wildland, where the nightingale has returned. And you write about people coming to this place. They're hearing this sound again after years, and they're weeping. Why do you think that's such a powerful experience for people? Well, because the nightingale is just deeply embedded in the English consciousness.

18:44Scott Weidensaul:When you talk to somebody from the UK, particularly somebody of a certain age that had experience with nightingales as a young person, it's just what makes England England in some respects, especially in the outdoors. And they're gone. I mean, nightingales, their populations have declined by like 98 % in the last 40 or 50 years. And so – How did they get them back? Well, at NEP, they just simply let the land go. They let it start to revert to thorn scrub, hawthorn and blackthorn, which is exactly the habitat that these birds need. And, you know, it's the old, if you built it, they will come. And so their numbers have been increasing rapidly at NEP.

19:26Scott Weidensaul:I had the opportunity to go out on a nightingale safari one evening, and there were four or five of these birds singing in the dark around us. And even though I'm not English and I don't have that emotional connection to these birds, it's such a beautiful song. They're just sort of these males. They have hundreds of variations on their songs that they sing. They're just constantly riffing. It's kind of like feathered jazz musicians. It was an extraordinary thing. under the approach to Gatwick Airport. So there were jets thundering overhead. It was this very strange mix of wildness and 21st century life.

20:04Iroro Tanshi:So that's what this rewilding is. It's essentially letting the land go back to the way that it was. And you write about a couple of different examples here, including in the mountains of Romania, where they're using, this is fascinating, they're using bison to help move the process along. Just tell me briefly about that. This is in the Southern Carpathian Mountains,

20:21Scott Weidensaul:which is one of the largest wild areas anywhere in continental Europe. And they're not using American bison. They're using European bison. And they're hungry. And so they're, you know, as at the Nepestate where they're using, you know, English longhorn cattle and Exmoor ponies and several species of deer to sort of modify the land naturally, in the southern Carpathians, they're doing the same thing with bison. The bison strip the bark off trees. They create openings. And what they're doing is maintaining this mosaic of habitat across the landscape that these birds have depended on, you know, that humans had maintained with their grazing animals for many years.

21:01Scott Weidensaul:The bison, which had been extinct in the Carpathians for more than 250 years, are now doing that on their own.

21:07Iroro Tanshi:Well, you say pretty clearly in this book that saving birds can save the planet. A world that works for birds will work for us all. I have to ask though, what realistically do you think lies ahead for so many of these species that you've been talking about despite our best efforts to save them when so much damage has already been done to the planet?

21:28Scott Weidensaul:That's a hard one. And I think that – I understand what the stakes are here. I understand what the challenges are here. But I also understand that one of the biggest hurdles we face is despair. Is it going to be hard to bring back birds? Might it be impossible to really bring back birds? Maybe. But the only way we know it's impossible is if we don't try. And as you say, a world that works for birds in their complexities of migration, the fact that they inhabit every single ecosystem on this planet, if we can figure out a way to make this world work for birds, it's going to work just fine for everything else, including us.

22:08Iroro Tanshi:Scott Wiedensahl is the author of The Return of the Oyster Catcher, Saving Birds to Save the Planet. Scott, thank you so much.

22:15Scott Weidensaul:It's been such a pleasure. Thank you, Peter.

22:21Iroro Tanshi:if you are a birder or bird curious or just like stories about birds we've done a few recently that you might be interested in scroll back in the feed to march 7th or search for our episode called this fairyland bog is a beacon for winter birders and a sponge for the climate that's a visit to minnesota's sax zim bog where high season is the frozen depths of winter when owls and other rare birds fly south from the boreal forests of Canada. Check it out and follow Here and Now Anytime so you don't miss any future coverage. It's not the last story we're going to do about birds. I can tell you that much.

22:59Iroro Tanshi:But coming up, we've got one more story about another animal that's seldom seen and underappreciated. Stick around.

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25:26Iroro Tanshi:10 years ago, wildlife researcher Yororo Tanshi found something incredible in a cave in Nigeria. A species of bat known as the short-tailed round leaf bat that had not been seen there in almost five decades. Her discovery helped kickstart a conservation movement in West Africa to protect rare bats from poaching and wildfires, as well as other threats. And for that work, she's one of the winners of this year's Goldman Environmental Prize, sometimes called the Green Nobel. She told Scott Tong, the short-tailed round-leaf bat is about the size of a golf ball, but with a wingspan of up to 10 inches.

26:04Iroro Tanshi:It's a cute fluff ball that just becomes this beautiful, beautiful hand-winged animal that flies around. Your rediscovery received a lot of attention, helped attract funding for you and your research partner, scientist Beneth Obite, who happens to be your husband. And the two of you, some of your work is educating people. So let me ask you, do bats get a bad rap? They do. And it's the first thing on everyone's thong, like, why bats? You know, we get asked that question all the time. And we just soak it up. You know, we're like, yes, let's talk to this person about bats and bring our passion. Some people might say, well, I still don't like bats.

26:49Iroro Tanshi:In Nigeria, there's a lot of stigma about bats being like witches. By witches, do you mean there, for some, there is this notion that they're possessed or something? That's exactly right. People typically just don't only shy away, but they're also persecuted in the sense that if there's a bat on your wall, for example, you know, people will take that as a bad omen and they will kill that bat people start to pray and start to bring down the bats and it's all this sort of negative perception and bad rap that bats get either just from the cultural connotations but also you know the movies haven't really helped whenever count dracula is showing up there's got to be a bat somewhere in the background or lots of bats in the background.

27:39Iroro Tanshi:It doesn't help. You know, media hasn't helped. Well, the reality, of course, is these bats are endangered. Tell me about that and how you defend against that. The golf-sized bat, the short-tailed round-leaf bat, it doesn't really like people. And I hate to put it that way, but it's not because it hates people. It just doesn't like to be disturbed. So when you approach this bat, if you were, you know, looking for it in the forests, or at least in the cave especially, it doesn't fly away quickly. It has what we call weariness. It has a long weariness time. So it will stay there for a while until you get really close and bother it.

28:19Iroro Tanshi:But as soon as it vacates that cave, it doesn't come back. Where a lot of people are doing hunting and whatnot, you're not going to find a bat there just straight up. It would not be there because there's too much disturbance. The key problem for bats, at least for the species, is the loss of habitat, primarily from wildfires. Just to talk about wildfires, the Goldman Prize team is recognizing your work protecting these Nigerian bats from wildfires. And I understand farmers in the area can set fires to clear their land for planting. So how have you worked to reduce the incidence of these fires?

28:57Iroro Tanshi:What we're really dealing with is a scenario where local communities have used wildfires for centuries and they would use the weather to predict when's the best time to burn. But it's not a very precise model in their minds. It's like, oh, we can burn just after the end of February and it should be fine. But you see, with erratic weather patterns, that has completely altered their ability to make those predictions that are, you know, in your mind predictions. So you were succeeding at discouraging farmers from setting fires at dangerous times when they could become wildfires. So they're more limited fires and they're less frequent.

29:43Iroro Tanshi:And then you aim for zero out of control wildfires and therefore protecting the bats. That's exactly right. You can draw an arrow through all of these activities and get to back-protected. People don't often realize this. When you say you're protecting an animal, it doesn't mean you're taking that, if it's a wild animal, it really does not mean that you're taking that, individuals in that population or that species, and putting them in cages to protect them from threats and whatever. No, you are protecting your natural habitat. That's what you want to do. You want to protect the landscape for them.

30:16Iroro Tanshi:So because you're doing that, you're now protecting the bat population. And in our case, we have seen not just higher rates of encountering these bats, but also other bat species in the area. And I could easily also tell you that it's also had impacts on the local communities too.

30:41Iroro Tanshi:there's more to that conversation and you can listen to it and find pictures of the bats at hereandnow.org but that's it for the show today here and now anytime comes from npr and wbur boston today's stories were produced by will walkie and me chris bentley our editors were mark navin michael scotto and cat welch technical direction from caleb green matt reed and andre Peralta. I wrote the theme music with Mike Moschetto and Max Liebman. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. And here at now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend and we'll be back with you on Monday.

31:30Iroro Tanshi:This message comes from DonorsChoose. Every day on DonorsChoose.org, teachers ask for the books, supplies, and learning materials their students need. Because every day, teachers show up for their students. But who's going to show up for teachers? because appreciation shouldn't stop at thank you. It means taking action. Books for the classroom, supplies for students, support teachers can count on. Show classroom heroes the appreciation they deserve. Donate today at donorschoose.org slash local. This message comes from ID Tech. ID Tech is where kids 7 to 17 find their people. The Camp Crunch Labs IRL, BattleBots, and Game Design people.

32:12Iroro Tanshi:Visit IDTech.com and use code IDTech to save$150. This message comes from Mercy Corps, helping families persevere through crisis, hunger, and natural disaster, and equipping vulnerable communities so they can adapt and thrive. Your support helps deliver life-changing support in over 35 countries. Visit mercycorps.org slash donate to build a stronger tomorrow.