A tiny bat has stolen New Zealand’s annual bird of the year competition from under the beaks of feathered contenders.
The country’s rare long-tailed bat, known as the pekapeka-tou-roa, beat its avian rivals by 3,000 votes.
Lissy Fehnker-Heather, of the contest organisers Forest and Bird, said that this year’s competition had the highest number of votes in its 17-year history.
Second place went to the kakapo, a native owl parrot, while the titipounamu, a wren, came third.
Fehnker-Heather said that bats were threatened by possums, stoats, rats and cats and that the competition was an opportunity to give them a moment in the sun.
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The tiny interloper — it has a body the size of a thumb and a wingspan the size of a hand — only flies at dusk and is so rare that it is unknown how many are left.
“Bats are New Zealand’s only native land mammals, and they are classed as nationally critical, and they face a lot of the same threats that our native birds do.
“This year, we thought we’ll try and get more people aware of bats and the threats that they face. We thought we’ll include them in the Bird of the Year because there’s only two bat [species] — having a bat of the year competition would not have been very exciting,” Fehnker-Heather told Radio New Zealand.
However, some suggested that the rules were bent to admit the bat because they have been maligned in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Bats have been associated with the Chinese origins of the virus.
“I love bats, but bats are not birds,” one Twitter user said. “It’s adorable. But not a bird,” another said.
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Others defended the outcome with one posting on Twitter: “Bats clearly shrewd at turning around own PR after pandemic turned their brand into crisis.”
The online poll, which draws tens of thousands of votes, has attracted controversy in the past. In 2019 hundreds of Russians voted, leading to claims of foreign interference. In 2018 it was revealed that hundreds of fraudulent votes had been cast by Australians attempting to rig the contest in favour of the cormorant, commonly known as the shag.
