Missile tech and microbats, using thermal imagery in wildlife rescue Weâre sorry, this service is currently unavailable. Please try again later. Dismiss Save Normal text size Advertisement When ecologist Doug Mills started out trying to tally threatened Australian microbats as they streamed out of their caves, traditional methods of tag and recapture or physical counts were tedious, expensive and carried a mistake rate approaching one third. That error range made tracking the fate of species such as the large bentwing bat particularly difficult. The microbat, large only in relation to the even tinier little bentwing variety, weighs only about 13-14 grams, and is already listed as vulnerable in NSW.