© J.Kaczanow

Bats are the only true flying mammals and have lived on the earth for more than 50 million years. There are 16 species in the UK but all are in decline.

British bats only eat insects – they are a natural insecticide!

British bats DON'T drink blood, they ARE NOT blind, and they don't fly into your hair or harm your loft or house.

In fact they are warm-blooded mammals just like us with good eyesight, they have soft fur, suckle their young with milk and they groom themselves every day. They are also long lived (Greater Horseshoe Bats can live for up to 30 years!), intelligent and have complex social lives.

All bats and their roosts are protected by law. It is an offence to:

•  intentionally kill, injure, catch or sell bats;

•  damage or destroy roost sites;

•  disturb bats by entering a known roost or hibernation site

If you have bats in your house and are worried about them, contact English Nature for free advice (see link to web site).

Sources of Info:

R. Stebbings. Antony Nelson 1986. BATS – a Mammal Society Series.

T. Mitchell-Jones. English Nature 2000. Focus on Bats booklet.

Bat Conservation Trust. Various leaflets:

www.bats.org.uk

Devon Bat Group

Bat's knees bend in the opposite directions to ours! This is so their leg, feet and tail assembly can be moved into position as they fly towards their perch, they then twist and flick themselves into position.In winter when insects are scarce, bats hibernate in cool dark places. They actually slow down their heart beat (to only a few beats per minute) and cool down their body temperature to conserve energy and make their body's food reserves last. Occasionally they may wake up and take short flights during hibernation, especially during milder weather – the first thing they do is have a wee!

Baby bats are born upside down. Mum uses her wings as safety net. The babies have fully formed adult feet (that look huge on them!) and clawed thumbs to cling on to mum and onto wall/roof when she goes out feeding. Bat's claws on their feet are so large and curved that they can hang upside down safely even when asleep or hibernating – some also stay hanging after they have died!

Greater Horseshoe Bats

One of our biggest and rarest bats, there are only about 5 to 6000 left in the UK , confined to South West England and South West Wales. An adult Greater Horseshoe is about the size of a small pear, it has a wingspan of 35 – 40 cm and at its heaviest it weighs about the same as 3 £1 coins! There is a 100 strong breeding and nursery colony in one of the caves at Berry Head Quarry, Brixham. The females arrive after getting pregnant in the spring (even though they actually mated in the autumn, they store the sperm until the season is right – no other mammals can do this!). They exclude the males and huddle together to keep warm in cold weather.

Their horseshoe shaped noseleaf is for BROADCASTING and RECEIVING their special ultrasonic sounds, they use the echoes of these sounds to catch insects and to navigate in complete darkness, this is called echo-location. The ultrasonic sounds are of much too high a pitch for humans to hear, however, they are still ‘loud' sounds and the bats have a special way off shutting down their hearing each time they make the sound – otherwise they would be deafened. Of course they then have to turn their ears back on to hear the echoes – in fact bats are capable of switching their hearing on and off 200 times a second! As well as all that, horseshoe bats can change the shape of their noseleaf to form a widely spreading beam of sound, if they are generally trying to locate some flying insects, to a narrow beam if they are homing in on an unfortunate moth.

Greater Horseshoe's love to ‘hang out' on a favourite perch in a tree, waiting in ambush, then flying out suddenly, echo locating to take out a passing insect – they will eat it in flight or if it's a big one they will return to the perch to munch it at leisure.

When Greater Horseshoes are sleeping or hibernating they wrap their wings around themselves like a cloak so only the tips of their ears show.

Tens of thousands of Greater Horseshoes have been wiped out over the last 100 years by humans either directly, through the blocking up or destruction of their cave and tree roost sites, or indirectly, through modern farming techniques which have destroyed old meadows and hedges and killed off millions of insects by using huge quantities of insecticides. All our other species are threatened for the same reasons.

Greater Horseshoes love dung beetles – a totally tasty snack! The beetles are slow and clumsy fliers and are the perfect food for the youngsters on their first flights with Mum out of the roost in August. The Berry Head bats have a difficult time finding food as they are surrounded on 3 sides by the sea – thus the Torbay Coast & Countryside Trust have started grazing cattle in the fields at the back of Berry Head – to provide a plentiful supply of cow pats for the beetles!