New Zealand Lesser Short-tailed Bat

Fascinating facts about the New Zealand Lesser Short-tailed Bat

• A single lesser short-tailed bat can gulp up half its own weight in moths each night – that’s about 6 to 7.5 grams of flying insects for a 12-15 gram bat. This tiny appetite shows how efficiently they turn scarce nocturnal prey into vital energy.
• When they hit the forest floor, these bats fold their wings and walk on all four limbs, using claw-like basal talons to dig through leaf litter – a trait no other chiropteran shares. Their ground-hunting skill rewrites the rule that bats must always stay airborne to feed.
• Males take to the night sky each spring and summer to belt out songs from roost trees, taking turns in a lek where multiple may perform in a single evening.
• Their echolocation clicks sweep a narrow 20-40 kHz band, each pulse lasting only seven to nine milliseconds, but the calls get scrambled by forest floor debris, forcing the bats to rely on smell when foraging on land. This dual-sense strategy illustrates how evolution tailors sensory tools to each hunting arena.
• Fossil clues place the Mystacinidae family’s split from other bat lineages between 68 and 35 million years ago, with the genus Mystacina appearing around 20 million years ago and likely reaching New Zealand between 5.3 and 20 million years ago. Their ancient isolation explains why they evolved such singular ground-walking and pollinating habits.

At a glance

About the New Zealand Lesser Short-tailed Bat

The New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat, or pekapeka, is a diminutive, ground-skipping microbat weighing just 12-15 g, cloaked in thick fur that ranges from light to dark brown with a paler belly. Its forward-facing ears and outward-flaring nostrils give it an acute sense of echo and smell, while a short, stubby tail and robust hind-legs end in basal talons, tiny claws absent in other bats, that let it scuttle across leaf litter as deftly as it flutters between trees. These bats inhabit untouched forest interiors across both main islands and surrounding isles, from sea level to alpine woodlands, though they have also been spotted in farmland and shrubland. They roost in large tree cavities, forming fission-fusion colonies that can swell to thousands, and males perform nightly lek songs from roost trees each spring and summer to attract females. A true omnivore, the pekapeka harvests moths, spiders, huhu beetles, nectar, pollen and fallen fruit, sometimes consuming half its body weight in moths in a single day. It forages both aerially, using 20-40 kHz echolocation calls lasting 7-9 ms, and terrestrially, folding its wings and walking quadrupedally while sniffing prey from the forest floor. This dual foraging mode, a legacy of New Zealand’s predator-free past, also makes the bat an essential pollinator, ferrying pollen of species such as Collospermum microspermum and the wood rose Dactylanthus taylorii, thereby linking its survival to the fate of native flora…

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