Behavioural flexibility within ecological constraints: Local‐scale landscape composition modulates habitat selection and foraging strategies in a forest‐dependent carnivorous bat

Behavioural flexibility may allow animals to use heterogeneous landscapes, but the extent of this flexibility remains bounded by species-specific habitat requirements. We examined how local landscape composition relates to habitat selection and foraging behaviour in Chrotopterus auritus, a forest-dependent Neotropical carnivorous bat. We tracked 17 individuals across 57 nightly trajectories in 3 landscapes differing in local habitat composition and combined resource selection functions with hidden Markov models to evaluate habitat selection and the spatial expression of two inferred foraging strategies, active search and sit-and-wait. Evergreen and subdeciduous forests were consistently selected across trajectories and landscapes, whereas other forest types and most non-forest land-cover classes were not consistently selected. Associations with non-forest elements were nevertheless highly variable among local contexts. Agricultural areas, roads and other open elements were incorporated into some trajectories in the more heterogeneous landscapes, whereas movements in the most continuously forested landscape remained largely within forest. Despite this context-dependent variation in landscape use, both inferred foraging strategies were expressed predominantly within evergreen and subdeciduous forest. Across individuals, these two forest types together accounted for more than 75% of the locations assigned to each strategy, whereas median percentages within individual non-forest classes were generally below 5%. Land-cover composition was more clearly associated with where the two strategies were expressed than with when individuals switched between them. Our findings show that behavioural flexibility can generate context-dependent landscape use without removing the ecological requirements that constrain it. More broadly, the use of modified landscape elements should not be interpreted as reduced habitat dependence without identifying which components of habitat use vary across landscapes and which remain consistent.