Experts and young naturalists of the Center of Rehabilitation of Bats Feldman Ecopark spent more than a week in the woods near Liptsy (the Kharkiv district of the Kharkiv region), studying bats.
“August is time of autumn migration in bat’s life when animals come back to places of winterings. N put it more simply, they inspect the winter lodgings. Adits in Liptsy is the unique place in the east of Ukraine where about 1000 bats of three species winter, – the head of the Center Anton Vlashchenko tells. – More than 10 years the Kharkiv specialists in bats in the last week of August set out to expedition to study how the resettlement of small animals in adits took place and to band them”.
During the expedition more than 200 bats were caught and banded, 23 of them were already banded in last years, the age of the most senior is 3-4 years. As experts note and it is not a record, chiropterans can live for 30-35 years.
Adits in the neighborhood of Liptsy, most likely, were created in XV ІІІ century; they were used for extraction of sandstone. Because of a number of characteristics and its unique combination: location near large reservoirs, in young forest on a beam slope, quite big sizes of underground cavities, abundance of cracks in walls, comparative constancy of temperature and humidity they are an ideal shelter for a large number of bats.
We will remind that the program for rescue and rehabilitation of bats is implemented in Feldman Ecopark since the end of 2013. For a winter season the Center saves and arranges on wintering from several hundred to several thousand bats. In the spring they release back in the nature. The staff of the Center is actively engaged in scientific research: study species ranges, a way of migration and quantity of chiropterans and regularly represent their results at the All-Ukrainian and international conferences.
