The Hills’ horseshoe bat, which hadn’t been seen for 40 years, was recently discovered in the rain forest of Rwanda. “The bat’s face was alien,” carolynkor writes, “an evolutionary screwball fit for the dark.”
In January, 2019, a multinational team of biologists set out into the rain forest of southwestern Rwanda, in search of a near-mythical bat that they thought might be extinct. The Hills’ horseshoe bat—in Kinyarwanda—hadn’t been seen in forty years. Scientists had caught and recorded it only twice, in 1964 and 1981, roughly five miles apart, in a forest reserve named Nyungwe. But then conflict and war, culminating with the genocide in 1994, devastated the region.
Lost-species quests can seem like wild-goose chases, but as Barney Long, the senior director for conservation strategies at the nonprofit organization Re:wild, told me, you can’t save what you don’t know is there. “Unless we know the distribution of, and threats to, a species, we can’t put in place conservation actions to save it from extinction and put it on the road to recovery.” In 2017, Re:wild, under Long’s direction, createdof its “Top 25 Most Wanted Lost Species.
Researchers work through taxonomic keys to determine whether they had just caught a Hills’ horseshoe bat in Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park.The obsessive people who search for these animals are their own variety of rare—sparsely found across a wide geographic range, in all sorts of habitats. In New Zealand, an entire charitable trust is dedicated to finding and saving the South Island kōkako, a bird also known as the grey ghost, largely by mapping reports from people who have heard the.
The team was unable to camp in the park, so they only had a few hours in the evening to work. At dusk, they set up mist nets to capture bats. But torrential rains made the work nearly impossible, and they often had to close the nets early. They could, however, leave up harp traps all night. Bats fly into the traps’ nylon strings, which are vertically fastened between two rods—like a rectangular harp—then they slide, fall, or shimmy into a canvas bag hanging below.
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