Articles
My first detailed introduction to the world of bats was a lecture series during a Zoology undergraduate programme at Queen Mary College, London, back in the swinging sixties! Prior to that, as a 12 year old messing around in rock pools in Devon I had already determined on a career in Marine Science but my fascination with bats remained. Upon relocating to the University of Singapore a couple of decades later I started up a course on bat echolocation and flight. Project and research students soon followed. Although Singapore’s bat fauna has been somewhat impoverished, the inventory assessments nevertheless permitted, in collaboration with Tigga, a projection of potential regional bat extinctions given current rates of forest loss or degradation in southeast Asia.
In 2000 I moved to another equatorial University – in Brunei, a relatively small sovereign state on the island of Borneo. Apart from my aquatic activities, I have further developed a research capacity for collaborative bat studies (particularly with Matt Struebig and Tigga Kingston) on this faunistically rich northwest corner of Borneo. My main association in SEABCRU is with forest dependant bats – quite appropriate since Brunei has more than 50% forest cover, nearly 20% pristine. Most of my bat work has been with insectivorous species but Brunei has significant populations of flying foxes and in the next few years I hope to get projects up and running on this highly important group.