Monthly Archives: November 2010

Diane Gregory of West Yorkshire Bat Group gave a wonderful talk on bats to an enthusiastic audience of Friends.

There are 17 or 18 species of bat in the UK of which two, the common Pipistrelle and the Noctule, are known to  frequent Adel Woods – we know because we saw and heard them on our Bat Walk with Steve Joul on 14 August (see the blog entry for that evening). If you go into the woods in Spring and Summer you will have the thrilling sight of them flitting around at the margin of the trees and open spaces. If you are really lucky you may well have them in your garden.  At Eccup reservoir you may well see a third species, Daubenton’s bat, which hunts over water. However, you won’t see any bats at the moment, because they are all on  sab-bat-ical – hibernating until the Spring!

Bats are a really important indicator of the health of our environment and wildlife – they are the top predators of common nocturnal insects, and are very sensitive to such things as landscape change, intensive agriculture, pesticides.  Unfortunately, the bat population in the UK has declined by about 75% over the last 100 years.  The Friends have started to help bats by putting up some bat boxes last January.  We want a healthy bat population in Alwoodley!

All bats are protected in the UK and it is illegal to disturb a bat roost. You may well have bats in and around the crevices of your house.  If you do, count yourself lucky, though the chances are that you will not know because they are very unobtrusive creatures – you can get about 200 Pipistrelle’s into a shoe box!

Should you find a bat in distress, or want to do some work on your house and think that you have bats living there, contact the National Bat Helpline 0845 1300 228 or the Bat  Conservation Trust http://www.bats.org.uk/ who will help you  and give you advice on how you can carry out your work while remaining within the law.

Our next bat event will be in the Summer when – with Diane’s help – we shall investigate whether the bat boxes we put up last January have attracted any bats.

A busy morning of varied tasks.

Scraping the mud off paths by the Slabbering Baby and along Crag Lane.
Litter picking – four bags of rubbish collected.
Clearing fallen trees from the woodland paths (see the Gallery).
Cleaning and surveying bird boxes.

A meeting in the woods with Steve Joul and Roger Brookes of Leeds CC and Craig Spencer of British Trust for Conservation Volunteers to:

•    clarify the route of rights of way and how they can be maintained; and

•     to dentify tasks which BTCV can do for us because they are too big for a Saturday or Sunday morning.

A very productive morning.