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Paleotropical islands are experiencing extensive land‐use change, yet little is known about how such changes are impacting wildlife in these biodiversity hotspots. To address this knowledge gap, we characterized bat responses to forest conversion in a biodiverse, human‐threatened coastal rainforest habitat on Makira, Solomon Islands. We analysed ~200 h of acoustic recordings from echolocating bats in the four dominant types of land use on Makira: intact forest, secondary forest, food gardens and cacao plantations. Bat calls were identified to the species level using a supervised classification model (where labelled data are used to train the system). We examined relative activity levels and morphological traits across habitats. Relative activity levels were highest in intermediately disturbed habitats and lowest in the most heavily disturbed habitat, although these differences were not significant. There were …