How scientists found an African bat lost to science for 40 years
Now the first recording of the Hill’s horseshoe bat’s echolocation call may help find more
![a Hill’s horseshoe bat in a green gloved hand](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/032522_ag_bat_feat.jpg?fit=1030%2C580&ssl=1)
This critically endangered Hill’s horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus hilli), which was released after scientists measured its features, marks the first recorded observation of the species since 1981.
Jon Flanders, Bat Conservation International
Julius Nziza still remembers the moment vividly. Just before dawn on a chilly January morning in 2019, he and his team gently extracted a tiny brown bat from a net purposely strung to catch the nocturnal fliers. A moment later, the researchers’ whoops and hollers pierced the heavy mist blanketing Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park. The team had just laid eyes on a Hill’s horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus hilli), which scientists hadn’t seen for nearly four decades.
Nziza, a wildlife veterinarian at Gorilla Doctors in Musanze, Rwanda, and a self-described “bat champion,” had been looking for the critically endangered R. hilli since 2013. For several years, Nziza and Paul Webala from Maasai Mara University in Narok, Kenya, with the help of Nyungwe park rangers, surveyed the forest for spots where the bats might frequent. They didn’t find R. hilli, but it helped them narrow where to keep looking.
In 2019, the team decided to concentrate on roughly four square kilometers in a high-elevation region of the forest where R. hilli had last been spotted in 1981. Accompanied by an international team of researchers, Nziza and Webala set out for a 10-day expedition in search of the elusive bat. It wasn’t rainy season yet, but the weather was already starting to turn. “It was very, very, very cold,” Nziza recalls.