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During recent decades, pathogens that originated in bats have become an increasing public health concern. A major challenge is to identify how those pathogens spill over into human populations to generate a pandemic threat. Many correlational studies associate spillover with changes in land use or other anthropogenic stressors^,, although the mechanisms underlying the observed correlations have not been identified. One limitation is the lack of spatially and temporally explicit data on multiple spillovers, and on the connections among spillovers, reservoir host ecology and behaviour and viral dynamics. We present 25 years of data on land-use change, bat behaviour and spillover of Hendra virus from Pteropodid bats to horses in subtropical Australia. These data show that bats are responding to environmental change by persistently adopting behaviours that were previously transient responses to nutritional …