13-07-2025
British bats are a conservation success story
Soon after sunset, a furious clicking can be heard at Hanningfield Reservoir in Essex. Some clicks emanate from bat detectors, which convert the high-frequency sound waves emitted by flying bats into noises that humans can hear. Others come from thumb counters, held by volunteers who are trying to tally the bats that pour out of a building. The racket resembles electronic music of a challenging type.
Two decades ago squeaks at Hanningfield alerted conservationists to the presence of soprano pipistrelles, which are among the smallest bats in Britain. The roost has become busier, swelling from a summer peak of around 500 pipistrelles in the early 2010s to at least 2,000 today. It is an extreme example of a general trend. The recent success of bats in Britain is a conservation triumph, but it suggests an uncomfortable conclusion. Laws that make building homes and infrastructure intolerably hard can have a good effect.
Bats are much harder to tally than birds, owing to their nocturnal habits and inaudible calls. Counts of hibernating, roosting and feeding bats show different trends. But almost all of the common species of bat are more numerous than they were when reliable measurement began in the late 1990s. The greater horseshoe bat, named for the shape of its nose, has tripled in number. Birds are faring considerably less well.
Bob Stebbings, who started studying bats as a child in the early 1950s, reckons that Britain still has many fewer than it once did. In the 18th century, the Rev Gilbert White claimed to see hundreds of bats at once over the River Thames. Poisonous timber treatments, bad weather and more intensive agriculture killed many bats in the second half of the 20th century. 'The bad bits of land that had rotting haystacks and old farm machinery disappeared,' says Mr Stebbings.
Bats can live for decades, generally have just one pup a year and form colonies. As a result, the accidental or deliberate eradication of a big maternity roost can set a species back for years. Bats are probably reviving in Britain because environmental laws have made such shocks rare. They seem to resist white-nose syndrome, caused by a fungus, better than American bats.
They have long been associated with magic, especially the dodgy kind. In 'Macbeth', the witches chuck bat fur into their stew. In Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula turns into a bat. The Victorian fascination with vampire bats (which live in Latin America) did not help. But bats would probably have disturbed anyway. As birdlike creatures that lack feathers, they strike some as untidy and unnatural.
These days bats have the magical power of blocking housing and infrastructure, or raising its cost. Norfolk County Council is struggling to build a major road near Norwich because of a colony of rare barbastelle bats. Nearby, in Thetford, people who oppose the redevelopment of a council estate have installed dozens of bat boxes, hoping to entice some of the protected creatures. Notoriously, a 'bat protection structure' is being built over the new hs2 railway line in Buckinghamshire at a cost of over £100m ($135m).
For a government eager for growth, this is unacceptable. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has urged builders to 'stop worrying about the bats and the newts'. A planning bill that is working its way through Parliament will weaken legal protections for bats and other creatures. Developers should find it easier to demolish habitat in one place, provided they pay into a fund that enhances it somewhere else.
The Bat Conservation Trust argues that the bill creates a 'licence to kill'. But the charity, and other wildlife outfits that oppose the legislation, have a problem. Although bats currently enjoy powerful legal protections, they have few close friends. The bct has 5,410 members, though other people belong to local bat groups. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has almost 1.2m. Ms Reeves would not dare to speak casually of cuckoos or curlews.
Public attitudes to bats have warmed over the years, though not to the point of adoration. A Greek study of attitudes to 12 species found that western barbastelle bats came dead last for attractiveness, below black vultures and fire-bellied toads. A study of Americans put bats roughly level with sharks. Cute in real life, bats can appear diabolical in photographs, making them the opposite of human supermodels.
Technology could make them more popular. Bat detectors are becoming cheaper and better. They tell people what kind of bats are around them, and can turn their inaudible sound waves into pretty patterns on a screen. From there, it is a short step to recognising a few species by sight. Noctules rise early and fly high and straight; pipistrelles flit at tree height; Daubenton's bats fly low and skilfully over water, plucking insects off the surface with their feet. The better you know something, the more you worry about it.
