It started me thinking of my own involvement with bats which started way back when I first went to Inverpolly NNR north-west of Ullapool.
I put up two bat boxes on the side of the house but when I was there they were never occupied. Some years later after I had long gone, I was intrigued to visit the house once again and see the tell-tale dark markings under both boxes where they had been used by pipistrelle bats for some years.
Putting them up had been prompted by my visit to a Forestry Commission area at Ardross north-east of Inverness where one of the first series of bat boxes in the UK were erected. I was impressed as on each of the conifers four boxes were placed in a ring round the trunks to try and judge which was the best position for any bats that used them.
My next involvement with bats was to give advice to anyone who contacted the Nature Conservancy Council, one of the forerunners of the current Scottish Natural Heritage. It involved many aspects, from people who found a bat, sometimes very young ones, in the house space to ones who just wanted the bats out of their house for various reasons.
One belligerent man ordered me to get rid of the colony of bats as his wife, and himself for that matter, was scared of them. When I refused, he wrote to his local MP who sent me a letter on the subject.
A more gratifying episode with bats was when we moved into this house 25 years ago and found we had a breeding colony of brown longer-eared bats in the loft. I just left them alone but liked to see them emerge in the evenings. Then last year, having to go into the loft space for something, I saw them again. Most were hanging in clusters and I was fascinated. I then found out that to look at them closer or even photograph them I would need training and a licence, so I decided to leave them in peace.
Then, as readers will recall, there was a single bat hibernating in the end room last December which was, in the end, dead. The Bat Conservation Trust was very helpful over their national helpline but I have been asked by them to say they are not a “group” as I called them in my diary as they are a “trust”.
If you want any advice over bats and want to know where to send in any records, then go to their website www.bats.org.uk where there is plenty of information.
While I was on the telephone to the trust, I asked what they considered were the best books. One is British Bats by John Altringham, another is Which Bat Is That? from the Mammal Society and the other is Bats by Phil Richardson in the Whittet series.
The superb photograph of the bat in flight is courtesy of the Bat Conservation Trust.
For the most up to-date information on bats, a good source is the Atlas of Highland Land Mammals edited by Ro Scott and published last year. It indicates that there have been seven species of bats recorded in the Highlands.
The rarest, according to the distribution maps in the Atlas, are the Natterer’s bat and the noctule bat. The latter is one of the largest British bats at 320-450mm and one I would really like to see.
One aspect of bats in the Highlands that has always fascinated me and is still to be resolved is where the bats in the Highlands go to in the winter. Nobody knows.
Record of the week
I GET a number of magazines and newsletter each month but one I always look forward to is the one that landed on my desk last week. It is the RSPB’s Birds magazine for February-April 2012 and, as always, it is packed with information.
What adds to the interest is the eight-page extra newsletter Scottish News which is inside and there is plenty for people in the Highlands.
For example, the first article is about the Nature of Farming Awards, with a long list of contenders from various parts of the UK. The winner of this award are Somerset and Carolyne Charrington with their Treshnish Farm on the Isle of Mull and they are to be congratulated. On the farm, creation and restoration has taken place of woodland, wetland, peat bog and moorland, and wildlife has just flourished.
There is also an interesting article on the common scoters that were mentioned in this diary some time ago.
They are doing well in the Flow Country in the north. Of the 52 breeding females in the UK, half of these are there. At least 21 ducklings reached near adult size on the RSPB’s Forsinard reserve but results were poor elsewhere in Scotland.
It was amusing to read of a new use for satellite or GPS systems, as these are more associated tracking birds such as ospreys. But on Birsay Moor on Orkney they have been used to track a cow to see where it grazes on a conservation grazing project.
