Ukrainians find glimmer of hope in war time by releasing hundreds of bats into the wild

While war wages around them, Alona Prylutska and her colleagues continue to do what they’ve always done — rescue injured bats.

And these days, with entire buildings being abandoned or reduced to rubble in the ongoing war with Russia, there are more bats than ever in need of rescuing.

This weekend, after a long winter of finding bats and nursing them back to health, the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center hosted its annual bat release festival. More than a thousand Ukrainians in a dozen cities came out to learn about the misunderstood creatures of the night — and set them free. 

“We give this unique opportunity to people to hold a bat in their hands and release them back to the wild — just let it go and they fly,” Prylutska, the Bat Rehabilitation Center’s co-founder, told As It Happens guest host Dave Seglins.

“War is every day and, of course, we need some positive things … so our event is one of them.”

Long before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, all 28 of the country’s bat species were listed as critically endangered.

Their biggest threat, Prylutska says, is conflict with humans.

“Unfortunately, people are afraid of bats in Ukraine. There are a lot of myths around them,” she said. “And, of course, war also impacts them.”

Bats hibernate in winter, she says. In Ukrainian cities, they often do that inside buildings. So when rockets and drones destroy urban infrastructure, they also destroy bats — sometimes entire colonies all at once. 

War also brings displacement, she said, and when people abandon their apartments, sometimes the bats become trapped inside. 

“They reproduce slowly — one or two offspring per year — so populations recover very slowly,” said Alona Shulenko, who headed Saturday’s release in Kyiv.

All Ukrainian bat species are legally protected, as the country lies on an important east European migratory route.

The Bat Rehabilitation Center has been working for 20 years to not only help bats, but also change the narrative around them, which is why they founded this festival to usher in spring 15 years ago.

Because of their work to de-mystify the flying mammals, people will often call them when they find unwanted, injured or trapped bats in Ukrainian cities. 

But nursing them back to health isn’t always easy, Prylutska says.

“Their wings are very fragile. It’s very easy to hurt them,” she said. “Luckily nowadays we have two veterinarians in our team and they do amazing work, sometimes incredible work to rescue those bats.”

During the spring festivals, the centre releases the bats that are healthy enough to survive independently in the cities where they found them.

In Ivano-Frankivsk, where Prylutska lives, they released 50 bats. In Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, they released more than 500.

Some 1,000 spectators in Kyiv cheered the creatures on as they flew to freedom, including families, off-duty soldiers, and bat enthusiasts, alike.

“Life goes on despite the war,” said Oleksii Beliaiev, a 54-year-old Kyiv resident who attended with his family. “The war is the main thing right now, but there has to be something else as well.”

Prylutska says she is glad there are people in Ukraine dedicated to saving human lives in trying times. 

“It’s very important, of course, to think about people, about children. But there are people who rescue animals,” she said. “We’ve been doing this for the past 20 years, and we keep doing this even during the war. It also helps us to keep alive and do something important.”

The charity says it has rescued more than 30,000 bats in total, including 4,000 bats last winter.

“We do what we can, each of us, in Ukraine,” Prylutska said.