“Reserving Happiness of Bats” is an activity that is conducted in 2007 by Teacher Chang, the ex-Secretary Director of Taiwan Sustainable Union. Its goal is to protect Formosan golden bats, Myotis formosus flavus. From 2008, he started to cooperate with the local communities, schools, township offices, and county governments. He hope to protect the Formosan golden bats by ducation, research, legislation and habitat protection.
Education
There are two ways we use on the development of education about the bats' environment. For our stuffs, there are one or two times class to train our staff and the volunteers. In class, they can learn about ecological conservation, the knowledge about bats, and skills, and make teaching materials about bats. For visitors, we set a limit of visitors. On one hand, we have bats' environmental introducing classes for visitors who reserve in groups in advance. In the class, they can visit and learn about the bats' environment. On the other hand, we also have some ecology camps, workshops, the bat stories speeches, promotion of bats’ house and playing some cartoons. We hope the public are taught that the bats are benefit for our environment by these activities and protect them with us.
Research
Education, research, egislation, and protecting the habitats are bound up with each other. Although it costs a lot to conduct a research, it would help a lot to have a useful result. This result can be used in environmental education, the teaching materials of popular science, and habitat construction. Moreover, it is benefited to make or revise the laws to let the laws be more suitable for the situation, or plan a perfect and feasible system to make ecological conservation more convenient to work.
Most of our staff are in middle age. Besides, they can’t conduct a long-term and effective research because of busy educational promotion. However, we still positively cooperate with other units to conduct related researches, such as contribution of golden bats (with Taiwan Sustainable Union), investigation of the caves that the golden bats hibernate (with Taiwan Sustainable Union), the developing history and application of the bats' house in Taiwan (with the Happiness Shop of Bats and Taiwan Sustainable Union), the dropping analysis about pesticide, heavy metals and virus of the golden bats (with National Taiwan Normal University, Chung Yuan Christian University, and Taiwan Sustainable Union), setting bats curing system in Taiwan (with Bat Association of Taiwan), tests of bats’ social enterprises (with the Happiness Shop of Bats and Taiwan Sustainable Union) and so on.
Legislation
In past few years, we make a lot of effort on the universality and promotion of environmental education. Formosan Golden Bat's Home is the 17th place in Taiwan and the 1st place in Yunlin which has the certification of environmentally educational places. When it comes to the protection on the habitats, we are trying hard to plant more trees, sell Non-Toxic agricultural products and teach about food and agriculture. On the research aspect, we cooperate with other groups to figure out the dilemma on the golden bat's conservation. On law aspect, we focus on reorganizing our system and changing our style to promote education smoothly and combine with the research data about bat's distribution and decreasing number of bats. By doing so, we are on our way to reconfirm the status of Formosan Golden Bats on law.
On reorganizing our system and changing our style, we have to improve on cooperating with government and making stable system. From 2013, we had no longer been a place belongs to the elementary school, but governed by the Yunlin County Government. What's more, Yunlin County Government are in contract with Taiwan Sustainable Union. It would make ore organize more stable and better, in time, ore effective on the golden bat's conservation. We have also been the only local culture museum about ecology. Apart from Wildlife Conservation Act which protect the golden bats, we try to make them conservation class and combine with the protection of cultural heritages and the Environmental Education Act. We want to set more restricts base on laws and use statutory fund to protect the golden bats.
Habitat Protection
There are two ways we use to protect the golden bats' habitats, create habitats and slow down the speed of pollution and development on their habitats. We used to cooperate with Yunlin County Government and Shuilin township office to hold some activities to plant more trees. So far, we are used to planting trees near our place and neighborhood. In order to reduce the chance that the habitats are developed, we also patrol around to protect the trees which the golden bats had lived in from being cutting. Moreover, the breeding area near Formosan Golden Bats Home and Hsu's House in Shuilin are not open for groups or individual to reserve to watch bats. The habitats where more than 50 golden bats live and the place they hibernates are not known in public to reduce the interference from human.
We have found six kinds of pesticide and many kinds of heavy materials in the golden bats' bodies. Therefore, we consider pesticide and heavy materials are the possible reasons why the golden bats disappear. As a result, by cooperate with eco-friendly peasants and manufacturers, we encourage the peasants in the golden bats' habitats use Natural Farming and promote the certification of Green Conservation and Eco-Friendly to reduce the pollution of pesticide and heavy materials to water and insects which would be drunk and eaten by the golden bats. We also encourage peasants to keep growing the crops without poisons and pollutions to make people, place and bats health by the eco-friendly promotion held by manufacturers and non-profit organizations, building the bats' house, habitats investigation, and purchasing by guaranteed prices.
