Movie Shoot Disturbs Bat Colony

[Cheryl Jones]

Movie Shoot Disturbs Bat Colony in Bulgaria’s Devetashka Cave
An inspection prompted by the Green Balkans NGO has led experts to believe that the preparation for the shooting of “The Expendables 2“ has had a serious impact on the endangered bat population of Bulgaria’s Devetashka Cave.
Read on:
http://cavingnews.com/20111117-expendab ... lis-norris

[NZcaver]

Additional news.....
http://www.dawn.com/2011/12/24/stallone ... onies.html

SOFIA: Bat experts have slammed the recent filming of a Sylvester Stallone movie in a Bulgarian cave, saying thousands of the mammals had suffered from the Hollywood treatment.

“Several thousand bats are missing from the Devetashka cave since our latest count in January when the visible colonies numbered 33,800 bats,” Boyan Petrov of the Museum of Natural History said Thursday.

A rough count after the filming of the star-studded Hollywood action blockbuster “The Expendables 2” in November found only about 8,500 bats.

“Never before have we counted less than 10,000 bats in wintertime,” Petrov said, adding however that he hoped the rest had just been chased away to adjacent caves.