News | Latest News | Lesser horseshoe bat event for Heritage Council’s Heritage Week

Vincent Wildlife Trust (VWT) is busy planning its first public bat event at one of its own reserves, which will take place in Kerry on 20 August during The Heritage Council’s Heritage Week (17-25 August). The Council’s theme for 2024 is ‘Connections, Routes and Networks’, which accurately describes our event.

The William King House is one of eight VWT bat reserves in Kerry and commemorates William King, who was Professor of Mineralogy and Geology at Queen’s College Galway —now University of Galway — between 1849 and 1870. Professor King was the first person to recognise the presence of the lesser horseshoe bat in Ireland in 1858 when one flew into his family home on the outskirts of Galway City. He also published the first illustration of the bat’s head showing its distinctive horseshoe-shaped nose leaf in 1859.  Today, the reserve is used by 500 lesser horseshoe bats.

Lesser horseshoe bat ©Frank Greenaway

Our Heritage Week event will begin indoors in Kenmare with a talk about the lesser horseshoe bat and Professor King. Then, weather permitting, we will travel by minibus to the reserve, where we will sit quietly outside as dusk approaches to witness the emergence of the colony. The bats will exit the building and fly along their chosen routes to their foraging grounds to find insects to feed on.

This year, thanks to a grant from the Heritage Council under its Heritage Organisation Support Fund, we have been able to create a network of volunteers in Kerry to help us carry out emergence counts at our reserves. These important counts are part of the National Monitoring Programme for the species and helps us to monitor its populations size on an annual basis.

Setting up the equipment to count lesser horseshoe bats.

Thanks to this funding, we were able to run a training workshop in April for new volunteers and then during May and June the volunteers helped us count out 1,943 horseshoe bats from our Kerry reserves.  

Although numbers at this event must be limited, a virtual tour of this and some of our other reserves will be possible via a video we will be launching for Heritage Week.  

Please visit https://www.heritageweek.ie/event-listings/lesser-horseshoe-bat-talk-and-emergence-event for more information and to book a place.