Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of technology in mediating human-bat relationships. Bodily attunements and technological openness toward the liminal materiality of bats renders these mammals present, provides behavioural insights and actively shapes how they are counted within conservation.

Paper long abstract:

Engagement with ethological science, affective encounters and nonhuman difference has generated concern for conservation practices and the processes of ecological learning. Presence and expertise can no longer be straightforwardly determined, whilst 'companion species' (Haraway, 2008) are increasingly recognised in unlikely places. This paper, an interdisciplinary collaboration, explores the role of technology in mediating human relationships with species whose liveliness is largely beyond our ordinary sensory capabilities through the case of Greywell Tunnel on the Basingstoke Canal, a protected bat hibernation site and setting for autumnal swarming.

Technological assemblages and practices are deployed in endeavours to translate the materiality of the bat population, establish presence and permit behavioural observation of bats as individuals (e.g. radio telemetry), transient populations (e.g. bat detectors) and swarms (e.g. harp trap). This paper will explore the work of technological mediators in 'making bats count' within conservation through their enrolment of bat activity and transformation of bodily relationships with humans.

Bat technologies are not passive intermediaries. Their agency is emergent from the affective capacities of attentive human and nonhuman bodies, and they do not permit unmediated access into the liveliness of the dark. Bat-human-technology assemblages are 'precarious achievements' (Whatmore, 2002) and as such the 'power to take into account' within bat conservation is always a resumption, never settled (Latour, 2004). Our bodies are not yet fully attuned to this nonhuman behaviour and our technologies remain partial, whilst the unsettling materiality of the bats endures within the liminal space of the swarm as both one and many.