Bats, the UK’s only flying mammals, are in serious decline, with their numbers dropping by 55% since the 1960s. This has led to legal protection for their breeding and resting places. While they often feature in spooky folklore, bats have an incredible 52-million year history on Earth, something I believe truly earns them our respect and curiosity.

My own fascination with bats started at the age of four, when one night my father woke my brother and me up to see this strange creature that had flown into the sitting room. This event sparked a lifelong interest that recently led me to conduct a bat survey here in the Park Ecovillage Findhorn.

Why I Surveyed Bats in the Ecovillage

Driven by the Community’s value of “co-creation with nature” and the ongoing development in our settlement, I undertook a bat survey from April to August 2024. My goal was to identify the bat species living here, understand their preferred habitats, and pinpoint their roosting locations. This way, we can not only protect them but also help them thrive alongside our human activity.

I started my survey with a heterodyne bat detector, which makes the bats’ high-frequency echolocation calls audible to us. This quickly showed me how common the common pipistrelle is here. These little bats actually make incredibly loud calls, but luckily for our ears, they’re outside our normal human hearing range!

How Bats Navigate and What They Eat

Bats navigate and hunt using echolocation, a remarkable system they share with dolphins and whales. They emit high-frequency sounds that bounce off objects, creating a “sound picture” of their environment. A fleshy spike called a tragus in their ears helps them interpret these sounds, allowing for precise navigation and incredibly accurate insect detection. Imagine this: a single common pipistrelle can gobble up to 3,000 midges in a night. As someone living in Scotland, I’m definitely grateful for that! While food types vary slightly between species, generally, bats here feast on insects like midges, mosquitoes, beetles, lacewings, spiders, and moths.

My Exciting Survey Findings

To get more accurate species identification, I used a more sophisticated static Anabat Swift bat detector. This recorded the bat sounds, which Aileen Salway, a bat specialist from NESBREC kindly interpreted for me. The results were exciting!

As expected, the common pipistrelle was the most prevalent species. But in the Hinterland area, I also found soprano pipistrelles and brown long-eared bats. The brown long-eared bats, with their exceptional hearing and slower, hovering flight, tend to live and hunt near woodlands, snatching moths right off leaves or grass. The survey showed high bat activity on the rides bordering the south of the woodland burial ground, highlighting how crucial treelines and hedges are for bats commuting between their roosts and foraging areas.

Cullerne Garden’s pond was another key habitat, here I identified all the species mentioned above, plus a less common one, the Natterer’s bat. It is the first biological record of the presence of this bat on the Findhorn peninsular which is exciting. It is medium-sized bat, with a slightly white underbelly which prefers areas with water but will also feed in pine plantations.

Understanding Bat Roosts and Vulnerabilities

Identifying bat roosts was a real challenge because bats use different locations throughout the year. This is also a challenge in protecting them. They can be found in mature trees under thick bark or in hollows, as well as in attic spaces, outdoor storage spaces and under soffits and tiles in buildings.

Female bats gather to form maternity roosts in May and June, where they raise just one pup a year. These young bats are particularly vulnerable to predation by cats when they’re learning to fly in August, as they sometimes get stuck on the ground. So, one way you can help bats in your area is to keep your cats indoors at night during that month!

Mating roosts are taken up in September and October, and then bats scout out hibernation roosts for the winter. These sites need to be cool and maintain a constant temperature, usually between 0-9°C, allowing the bats to enter a state of torpor where their heartbeat can drop to around 20 beats per minute. They stay in hibernation until as late as April here in Scotland.

This pattern of changing roosts throughout their yearly cycle makes bats vulnerable to human activities. Tree felling, especially of those with roost potential during the winter, and any demolition or renovation of old buildings need to be done with great care and awareness of what bat signs to look for. Mapping these roosts is a useful, albeit time-consuming, step to avoid inadvertently harming our local bat populations. It requires a lot of patience, tracking their flight paths, looking for droppings or moth wings, and watching potential sites around sunset when most bats emerge.

If you feel inspired to get involved in mapping bats and their habitat on the Findhorn peninsula, please do get in touch with me. I’d love to hear from you!