Michael Viney's splendid article on bats in this newspaper last Saturday came as no less than three people had told of sightings of these creatures of the night; "swallows of the night", as Michael so strikingly had it. A woman, staying in a house in the West, got up one morning, just as it was becoming light. She saw outside her window what seemed to be a flock of birds. In a few seconds she realised they were bats, returning from their night's hunting.
That night again, she watched and saw them issuing from a nearby area where there were a few huts and buildings among trees. Coincidence: miles away, a man who had owned a cottage for a couple of years told of seeing a bat creep up into a crevice outside his upstairs bedroom. He had heard, he said, odd shufflings from under the roof from time to time, but assumed it was mice. Bats are better?
Third report was simply that of a couple coming into a house which had been uninhabited for a few days and finding a tiny, dried-up creature behind a chair. Dead. No known holes in the roof, though they are now looking. It could hardly have come down the chimney? The first thing to be noted is that bats are protected under the Wildlife Act of 1976 and may neither be killed nor have their habitation interfered with. There are exceptions to all rules, of course, but you would be advised to make enquiries if you were thinking, for example, of blowing bats out of your roof space or otherwise interfering with them.
Remarkably, the English Field writes in its 1987 Book of Country Queries that in all the years (the magazine first appeared in 1853), there have probably been more queries in its pages about getting rid of bats or deterring them, in churches and houses, than about any other single subject. Then, tongue in cheek, it gave some methods which had been suggested over the years - before the new Wildlife Acts.
The most attractive seemed to have been this in many cases you place a stuffed owl (where now do you get one?) where bats will notice it as they approach, and change its position from time to time. Any kind of owl? Or only Barn Owl, white and distinctive? They don't say. Then they list the lethal methods.
Gilbert White of Selborne caught two bats of a variety, it seems, now known as Daubentons. He wrote that the fur was chestnut, sleek, their stomach contents too macerated to identify details: "their livers hearts and kidneys were large and their bowels covered with fat. They weighed each, when entire, full one ounce and one drachm." Bram Stoker had altogether different bats in mind.
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