Chapter Five: Bat out of Hell

When my mother was a teenager, she returned home after dark and headed for bed, only to feel something moving beneath the sheets. Assuming her sister had played a prank, she took a look under the duvet and found a bat, nestled in its makeshift den, and needless to say she has never quite got over the terror. A parent's phobia often passes onto their children, and while I have never had to join my mother in fleeing from the twilit sky, the chance of consciously searching for the winged rats of her nightmares wasn't exactly on my must-do list. With the Twilight franchise picking up steam and an official Dracula sequel out now though, every vampire's favourite flying rodent is due for a renaissance, so I was oddly excited at the invitation to learn how to detect bats in their natural habitat.

A quick train journey brought me to East London's Plumstead and environmental science graduate Cally, a 24 year old grass enthusiast with a recent fondness for bats. The animal's association with the dark and their resulting use in every horror B-movie ever means that most would baulk at anyone who seeks them out, but as we walked to Bostall woods to await the sunset, Cally (pictured below right) filled me in on some basics that had me strangely intrigued. Of the five or so thousand species of mammal in the world, more than a thousand are bats, seventeen of which can be found in Britain in varying nubers, but with increased light pollution and destruction of habitat, numbers are decreasing and surveying is all the more important. With a heightened feeling of purpose, we ventured into the woods, both marginally apprehensive of being murdered in the dark by our new internet acquaintance.

Luckily, neither of us turned out to be psychopaths, and we progressed to bat-detecting. Wandering through the undergrowth at night was amazingly atmospheric, the moon just visible through the trees and the dark pathways silent and secretive. Task aside, it was shaping up to be a really nice walk, but I was here to learn something new, and so out came our means to finding the winged creatures. What looked like primitive walkie-talkies were basic bat detectors, little black boxes which pick up the high frequencies of bats as they fly directly ahead. As we ambled through the dark, I accidentally disturbed a few wood pidgeons, but it seemed increasingly likely that our search had been unsuccessful. And then, the sound we had been looking for emanated from the detector, a radar-like echo made by the bats for hunting purposes. From there, all you have to do is look up, and as the detector continued to sound we could see tiny little pipistrel bats fly intermittently ahead. The sight would have brought my mother to hysterics, but I felt an unexpected elation at having found them, slightly special at having seen something in its natural and almost mysterious habitat. Craning my neck got a bit painful though and we moved on on our route, eventually finding our way out of the woods (Cally knew her way, of course, but one never knows when your friendly bat-loving guide is going to bring an axe out of her shoulder-bag) and back onto the road. If a Plumstead native had looked from their window at that moment, they would have seen two shadowy individuals in the middle of a field, heads darting after the final bat of the night, looking more than a little crazy. But even though more than one dog-walker thought that we were up to no good, (as you can see from the pictures above it didn't help that I was dressed like a cat burglar) it was definitely worth it; Bostall woods are beautiful at night (do take someone with you who knows their way around!), and bat-detecting was a lot of fun. Shepherd's Bush may not be the best place to continue the hobby, but with a bit more bat knowledge behind me I'm certainly ready to embrace my inner Edward Cullen and pay more attention to the sky once the sun's gone down.

Cally is recruiting helpers for a new park regeneration scheme based in Beaulieu Park in Norwood. If you're between 16 and 24 and interested in design workshops, tree planting, woodwork and more then send your name to Cally at young_friends_of@yahoo.co.uk