BRILLIANT BATS


BATS in the fells A


BY RICH FLIGHT


large part of Cumbria is dominated by the Lake District and its imposing mountains; they are the characteristic image


of the Cumbrian landscape. However, although millions of people spend their free time walking and climbing in the fells, the wildlife oſten goes unnoticed. That was the case for the bat life. Bats are generally thought to be lowland animals, intrinsically linked to woodland areas and preferring mild weather. The tops of the mountains therefore sound like a prety inauspicious place to find them. However, a few chance conversations


with people who had seen bats in the mountains led me to create a project to try and research whether our Cumbrian bats were tougher than we thought. I started by heading up into the mountains at night with a bat detector to see if I could find any of our flying friends. This was a long shot, and aſter almost an hour of darkness with no bats, I started to doubt myself. But


26 Cumbrian Wildlife | September 2019


then I heard them! The distinctive clicks of a flying bat, emanating from my hand- held bat detector. It was flying up a ghyll towards me and the tarn I was stood next to. I was then treated to several minutes of fly-pasts as this pipistrelle bat foraged for midges over the tarn water. This was brilliant. But it was a very small piece of data when you are trying to establish bat presence in the whole of the fells. It’s very difficult to survey such vast areas of land for bats; they are small, come out when it’s dark, and do not make sound that we can hear with our naked ears. Although on further night-walks I occasionally encountered the odd bat, I felt as if I was literally stumbling about in the dark! I therefore needed a way of collecting data over a more prolonged period of time. This is where static detection comes in. It is now possible to purchase


waterproof bat detectors that can be leſt out for prolonged periods. These small


camouflaged boxes record the sound of any bats that fly past for as long as the bateries last (usually around 2 weeks). I therefore put a request in to the South Cumbria Bat Group (of which I am now Chairman) and completed a funding request to the National Park Authority and managed to raise the funds to purchase six of these remote detectors. A bit of advertising through the Wildlife Trust and on social media and I managed to gather together a team of volunteers, who agreed to help me deploy these detectors in mountainous locations above 1,500ſt. Therefore, during the summer of 2017, the team and I regularly put out and collected in these detectors from locations within a grid that I had devised that covered all the high fells of Cumbria. And we found bats! Lots of them! Of


the eight resident bats in the county, we potentially recorded every single one, even the brown long-eared bat,


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