Welfare and Handling Recommendations for Bat Surveys in Canada
Format of work:
Peer-reviewed monograph
Event presented at / Journal Name:
Journal of North American Bat Research
Speaker / Contact Author's Name:
Daniela Losada Medina
Speaker / Contact Author's E-mail Address:
pa24683@bristol.ac.uk
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Research aim:
To develop evidence-informed and consensus-based capture and handling recommendations for bats to minimise their stress, injury and infectious disease transmission during catch–mark–release surveys and health surveillance work in Canada, while still allowing researchers to meet conservation and monitoring objectives.
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Background:
Over the last two decades, North American bat research has expanded rapidly due to the recognised impact of anthropogenic threats and white-nose syndrome on bat populations, driving increased bat capture, monitoring and health surveillance. Existing North American documents remain to be updated in view of the current bat research landscape, or focus on methods to maximise bat survey efficiency, while bat welfare considerations are rarely explicitly mentioned. Much good practice remains as “cultural knowledge”, passed from mentor to mentee, rather than publicly available guidance. Canada also lacks unified national regulations for bat capture and handling (with only a few provincial exceptions), creating an urgent need for accessible best-practice guidance that can inform permitting and research.
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Approach:
The Canadian Bat Welfare Working Group (CBWWG) synthesised peer‑reviewed, grey literature, unpublished data, and collective knowledge spanning decades of practitioner experience. Four national workshops (late 2022–early 2023) brought together academic, government, NGO, consultant, wildlife health and animal‑welfare specialists to develop consensus recommendations covering: study planning, biosafety, trap and net capture and removal, restraint, handling, holding, marking, release, sampling, euthanasia, photography and health surveillance, that prioritise bat welfare. The group also developed practical ‘decision thresholds’ for repeated captures, net and trap checks, and holding times that may vary depending on intrinsic (e.g., bat species, health status) and extrinsic factors (e.g., time of night, environmental conditions) as well as study objectives.
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Key finding:
The work shows that clear welfare-focused guidance can be embedded across every stage of bat surveys without making studies unworkable, by framing recommendations as ranges and decision thresholds rather than fixed prescriptions. Concrete welfare safeguards include: shorter holding times and acclimation periods for sensitive taxa (e.g., lasiurines, Myotis lucifugus), conservative limits on time in nets, traps and bags, explicit “stop rules” (e.g. suspending projects after two casualties), and structured approaches to biosafety, decontamination and handling of sick or injured bats. The guidelines also highlight specific methodological refinements — such as species‑, age-, reproductive status-, and season‑specific holding limits, cautious use of bands and passive integrated transponder tags, euthanasia technique recommendations, and strongly discouraging older marking methods — that can substantially reduce harm in routine survey work.
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Industry or policy relevance:
These recommendations provide a ready-made framework for bat surveyors, regulators, institutional animal care and use committees and industry clients (e.g. wind, mining, infrastructure) to specify welfare standards in permits and contracts. Although developed for Canada, the recommendations codify good practice that is directly applicable internationally, particularly in countries where welfare standards for mist-netting, harp-trapping and health surveillance are not yet fully documented. They directly support the implementation of the “3 Rs” (reduction, refinement, replacement) in field ecology, helping researchers design projects that achieve bat survey and monitoring requirements with less welfare cost. Because many drivers of bat survey efforts are policy‑led, having published, consensus-based guidelines should speed up and harmonise ethical review and reduce inconsistency between jurisdictions and projects.
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Route for practical application:
Practitioners can integrate the decision tables and species‑specific notes into field protocols and risk assessments, using them to set site‑specific thresholds for net and trap checks, holding times, and capture attempt frequency at different sites. Regulators and professional bodies can cite or adapt the recommendations into permitting conditions, standard operating procedures, and training requirements. Consultancies and research groups can embed the guidance into method statements and staff training, using it to justify methodological choices (e.g. trap type, marking method, winter work) to clients and ethics committees. Outside Canada, the monograph can act as a template: regulators and professional bodies can adapt the decision tables and welfare thresholds to local bat assemblages and legal frameworks, and use the document to benchmark or update existing guidance (e.g. safe handling and PPE documents already used in the UK and Australia).
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Confidence in findings and next steps towards realising impact:
Confidence is high where recommendations align with well‑established disease ecology, physiology and handling literature (e.g., rabies vaccination thresholds, WNS decontamination, energetic costs of arousals, basic PPE). In areas where evidence is sparse (e.g., long‑term impacts and predation risk of light tags, optimal tag‑to‑body‑mass ratios across species, comparative injury rates from different band/PIT configurations in different species, effects of topical antibiotic use), the authors explicitly flag reliance on expert opinion and identify these as research priorities. Next steps include: formal evaluation of welfare outcomes under different marking and tagging strategies, assessment of how widely and consistently the guidelines are adopted in permitting and industry practice, and periodic updating of the recommendations as new empirical data emerge and as other jurisdictions adapt the framework beyond Canada.
Funders:
Parks Canada and Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, Atlantic Region at the Atlantic Veterinary College of the University of Prince Edward Island.
Links to Open Access Publications or DOI:
Citation:
Patriquin KJ, Phinney L, McBurney S, McRuer DL, Barclay RMR, Broders HG, Crook A, Faure PA, Humber J, Hunter A, Jones M, Jung TS, Lausen CL, Losada D, McBurney T, Ratcliffe JM, Segers JL, Washinger D and Willis CKR (2026). Welfare and handling recommendations for bat surveys in Canada. Journal of North American Bat Research Monographs, 1, 1–67.
