On a nighttime walk across his Franklin County property 23 years ago, Billy Mclean watched a shadow swoop from the tree canopy with a grace he'd never seen before — a movement so fluid it made him duck. As an arborist who'd spent decades among those same trees, he thought he knew every creature that lived there. But in that moment, as his eyes traced the distinctive crescent-shaped wings, everything changed. "That's when I knew," he said. "We've got bats."
It's a realization that took Mclean years to share with his community. Despite his conviction that New Zealand's forests harbored these elusive creatures, he faced ridicule for insisting that pekapeka — the Māori name for bats, which means "treasure" in the context of species — lived in their backyards. Today, his persistence has sparked something larger: a grassroots movement to protect some of the world's most overlooked mammals.
New Zealand is famous for its birds, not bats. The country's only native land mammals are three bat species, and the outlook is dire. The New Zealand greater short-tailed bat hasn't been recorded since 1967 and is likely extinct. The remaining two species — the long-tailed bat and the lesser short-tailed bat — face extinction from habitat loss and predation by invasive possums, stoats, and feral cats. The long-tailed bat is classified as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, while the lesser short-tailed bat is vulnerable. Both are tiny, "chicken nugget-sized," according to Ben Paris, a senior conservation adviser for Auckland City Council, which makes them easy to overlook and easier still to kill during routine forestry work when landowners don't know to check for bat roosts before felling trees.
The gap in knowledge about these creatures is staggering. Grant Temporo, a senior research officer at the University of Waikato's Environmental Research Institute, told researchers that the country's Department of Conservation, which oversees much endangered species work, is severely limited in scope and funding outside of national parks. Small, fragmented bat populations persist across the landscape with virtually no one studying them. "So you have all these small, fragmented populations that are hanging on, but no one studies," Temporo said. "The overarching state of New Zealand's bats is just a big unknown."
Enter Finding Franklin Bats, one of the country's first community-led bat research groups. Operating in Franklin County near Auckland, the project teaches landowners and residents how to find, monitor, and protect the bats living on their properties. In just three years, volunteer numbers have surged from 50 to more than 180. In 2026, the group received enough funding to employ seven full-time staff members, six of them from local Indigenous communities — a meaningful alignment given that bats, or pekapeka, hold sacred significance in Māori culture, appearing in stories and the traditional face tattoos known as tā moko.
Among those volunteers is Zion Flavell, a member of Ngāti te ata, a Māori iwi from the Auckland region, who joined in 2023. He grew up hearing the stories embedded in tā moko but didn't connect them to living, breathing creatures until he learned that fragmented long-tailed bat populations clung to local properties. Now, as awareness spreads through Franklin County, the creatures Mclean fought for years to convince his neighbors existed are finally coming into focus — and with them, a chance at survival.