About
We are a group of people living in and/or around Limerick City and County who love bats and want to work towards protecting and raising awareness of these special creatures. We have a variety of projects on-going that seek to educate ourselves and the public about bats and enhance our natural environment for bat conservation. We work with community organisations and individuals who are interested in bat conservation in and around Limerick.
Limerick Bat Group committee includes Tanya Slattery, Albert Nolan and Sean Hartigan. If you would like to be involved in the committee or organise a batty event, please let us know by emailing the bat group or speaking to one of the committee members at a meet up. If you would like to join Limerick Bat Group and keep up to date with our goings on, email us limerickbatgroup@gmail.com and let us know!
If you know of a potential bat roost, email the details to limerickbatgroupdata@gmail.com. We will collate this data and investigate when we can.
****Please note that we are not a bat rescue nor are we involved in bat removal. If you need advice on there subjects we recommend you contact Bat Conservation Ireland.****
Projects
Training, Recording, Exploring, Mapping & Enhancing
Read our blog to see all about some past adventures we have had.
Training
At Limerick Bat Group (City and County), we are dedicated to providing training in the identification of bats to the public and members of the bat group. We meet at least once a month on the first Friday of every month. This will often be in the form of a bat walk at night. Check out our Facebook page events section for upcoming walks and talks.
Recording
Limerick Bat Group members take part in a variety of voluntary surveys and submit data to Bat Conservation Ireland. If you would like to take part in one of these surveys, contact us for more information.
Exploring
Members of Limerick Bat Group are exploring the City and County all the time. We send records of potential bat roosts to Limerickbatgroupdata@gmail.com.
These are then collated and we organise bat surveys in these areas to confirm roosts. As with all elements of Limerick Bat Group activities and projects, email us if you would like to be involved in this.
Upcoming Projects and Events
Mapping and Enhancing for bats
Watch this space
New equipment
Check out the lovely Audiomoth which Limerick Bat Group recently purchased with our grant from Bat Conservation Ireland.
Habitat mapping
We hope to run a workshop before the end of the year in mapping landscape connectivity using QGIS.
Enhancing habitats for bats
Bats use a variety of types of bat boxes. Check out the Bat Conservation Trusts website for detailed instructions on how to build a Kent Bat box. Lesser Horseshoe Bats are different to most other bats in that they can't crawl so require a special type of bat box. We hope to run a bat box building workshop with An Taisce's Living Limerick in September so keep an eye out if you would like to take part.
Pilot Limerick Lesser Horseshoe Bat Project
We hope to survey and map the habitats around Hospital in County Limerick in association with Hospital Tidy Towns Group, to identify areas suitable for bats and enhance those that are unsuitable.
We will use a variety of techniques to do this including the Audiomoth (Static Bat Detectors), night vision camera, QGIS and whatever else we can get our hands on!!!
We may do the same study with another similarly sized town in Limerick that does have Lesser Horseshoe Bats, so we can compare the habitats.
