Baker Consultants

Rae’s Field Trip to Devon with the South Yorkshire Bat Group

Last month, Ecologist Rae Smith joined the South Yorkshire Bat Group on their Exeter trip, hosted by Sarah Butcher from Devon Bat Group. Here’s what she had to say about the trip:

During the first night with the South Yorkshire Bat Group, we visited a Vincent Wildlife Trust mitigation site and met Daniel Hargreaves, who explained how the trust had designed and managed the building for bats. With it being late September, we weren’t sure how many bats to expect, so it was amazing when we ended up with over 300 Greater Horseshoe bats emerging.

During the building tour, it was great to see how the trust had made it suitable for use by bats year round, with a hot loft for the maternity season, and cold room for stable conditions for winter hibernation. It was also really interesting to hear about how VWT have implemented predator proofing at several of their sites, after having issues with nesting Barn Owls causing their roost counts to massively decline.

The next day we had a trip to Beer Quarry Caves, where we found a small number of Greater and Lesser Horseshoe bats, some hidden away, and others happily hanging from hooks in lit areas of the caves. From there we visited some WWII military buildings, which had been turned over to bats after the war. The buildings had several Greater and Lesser Horseshoe bats in them, it was great to be able to see them up close, with some flying right past us.

On the final day we did some bat box checks, and found two Soprano Pipistrelle mating roosts, each with a single male and 3 or 4 females. This was some great handling experience, checking the wing venation to identify which species of Pipistrelle bat we had. We also had chance to endoscope some nice tree features, including a known Barbastelle roost, but unfortunately nobody was home that day.

It was an amazing weekend getting to see so many Horseshoe bats, as I’ve only previously come across occasional foraging individuals while on bat surveys with work. Unfortunately we don’t have them in South Yorkshire, though a Lesser Horseshoe was recently spotted very close by in Derbyshire, so who knows where they may pop up next!

 

It was great to be able to use our 4-day week structure to adapt Rae’s working pattern so she was able to attend this CPD over a long-weekend, whilst still delivering on her regular project work.

The Baker Consultants team of ecologists hold multiple Class 1 & Class 2 bat licences, as well as ones for badger, GCN, dormouse, white-clawed crayfish and barn owls. So, to book in your protected species surveys & assessments, or to even chat about joining our team, please contact our Consultancy Director, Gavin Ward, on g.ward@bakerconsultants.co.uk.