Farnboro John
Well-known member
On Saturday as related on Johns Mammals 2008 I blew my entire stock of brownie points including probably the next three years' accumulation, on a failure of a trip to Norfolk to see a roosting Parti-coloured Bat that had come "in off". Fair enuffski, I thought, everybody dips once in a while.
Yesterday I googled to see if any of the photos noted as having been taken had made it to the web, and came up with an article in some Norfolk rag with the story and a photo of the actual bat in situ. By the time I had finished reading I was incandescent (not a word to use lightly for fear of mis-spelling) and have since come up with more and more reasons to be annoyed.
Bats Need Friends. Seen it on car stickers, and it is undoubtedly true. More or less all of the sixteen British breeding species are in trouble for a selection of reasons.
Destruction of the countryside. Grubbing up hedgerows disrupts patrol routes (bats follow lines of cover) and removes reservoirs of prey. Felling woodlands removes breeding sites and more hunting habitat. Most inexcusably, the guardians of the remaining green stuff increasingly "tidy up" the countryside, removing old and rotting trees for health and safety reasons. Health and safety? Can we not afford the risk of losing a few of our sixty-five million humans in order to make space for a few hundred thousand struggling bats?
Sealing of our own environment. Better sealed buildings with fewer gaps for bats to get under eaves, less tolerance of those already there, concreting over entrances to - well, everything, really, for fear again of hurt to one of those more-pernicious-than-rats hairless apes.
Insecticides applied on industrial scale to crop monocultures remove vast quantities of potential prey from the environment. Today I can drive across Britain overnight or during the day with a bare minimum use of screen wash, where thirty years ago the accumulation of insect body fluids drying on the windscreen would eventually force a stop and wipe by cloth regardless of use of screenwash and wipers.
Bats need friends. They have an unsavoury reputation among many of the public: they are active "during those hours when the powers of evil are exalted" (I'm re-reading Hound of the Baskervilles), some consider them flying rats, there is the whole Dracula thing, their wings are leathery and their colours subdued, they will chitter and leave droppings in your loft and so on.
I've been on a few bat trips now, both guided walks and box checks: and the majority of those offering such services are informative, helpful, eager to convey their enthusiasm and the conservation message, and recognise the natural alliance between active conservationists and those who spectate on wildlife either occasionally, desultorily or, like me and many of you, relentlessly. One thing noted not by me but others, however, is the extent to which bat people stuff the law down your throat, entirely unlike the approach of even the least compromising of RSPB wardens.
All of this, however, is more or less irrelevant to a vagrant bat, making no more than a pit stop in an abandoned public-access WWII pillbox on the North Norfolk coast.
News broke progressively and I left the wedding I was attending only after the service - but before the reception of course! By then the promise was of an organised viewing at dusk. Bloody good. I've had organised viewings of bats, a licensed batter brings the thing round, points out ID criteria, permits photography and everyone from a grockle who saw an interesting ad in the paper to a rabid lister like me gets a fascinating experience THAT THEY TAKE TO OTHER PEOPLE AND SPREAD A FAVOURABLE MESSAGE ABOUT AN ANIMAL THAT NEEDS FRIENDS!
Try googling "Parti-coloured Bat in Norfolk" and read the article. It has a photograph of the actual bat, and the name of the photographer is suppressed. Unusual, normally a photo-credit for gripping purposes is welcome. It is also made clear that the reason the bat went missing between 1800 and 1810 is because it was removed by a batter.
The facts are bare, but there are some indications. I think we may draw a few inferences.
Whoever removed that bat walked in without obvious gear such as nets, plucked the bat off the wall by hand, stuffed it in a cloth bag and walked out past the crowd on the beach without saying anything. So much for an organised viewing at dusk. The bat was removed with about an hour to go till dusk after it had spent the afternoon roosting quite contentedly.
It is suggested it was removed to prevent disturbance. By all accounts people had been in and out of the pillbox all afternoon, taking pix, and the bat hadn't moved an inch. It is one hundred percent clear that it was undisturbed in actual fact if not legal definition.
Now I come to my personal circumstances, which in relation to ticking and bat welfare don't matter a Mohne. At 1800 I was still travelling away from the wedding and towards Kelling. I had over an hour to go. If the son of a lipsticked pit bull that removed the bat had at least had the common decency to mention the fact so a pager message was issued I could have turned round immediately and been back at the party at least two and maybe three hours earlier than I actually was. Others who travelled considerable distances to dip could also have turned around.
It is fair to say also that RBA (other information services are available), who provide a service that I trust to an extraordinary extent, have been badly let down by someone over this. If there was no intention to organise a viewing, why was it announced there would be? If the plan was changed, when, by whom, and why was it not announced?
I am all in favour of bat conservation and many of the people involved in it. But this harks back to the worst days of conservation arrogance. Bats need friends. Only an idiot alienates those who already are friends of bats. Bird reserves have learned that there is conservation gold in twitchers. Some even notice that it is the interested birder who acts as the ambassador for conservation. However an alliance has partners, and just now I don't feel like one. I suspect that there may be some weird bat ringing-tick thing going on, or at least a form of one-upmanship or plain selfishness. It sure has nothing to do with bat welfare. Bat might have flown out early and been picked off by a raptor? Raptors have to eat something, that might have saved a British endangered individual something. What a load of (insert own choice here).
I can only suggest that if you find a rare bat that has no conservation significance (indeed some still argue that vagrants cannot be a loss to the species as they are doing it wrong already) and you want to share your good fortune, do not under any circumstances tell anyone in the bat world. Keep it to the birding community.
John
Yesterday I googled to see if any of the photos noted as having been taken had made it to the web, and came up with an article in some Norfolk rag with the story and a photo of the actual bat in situ. By the time I had finished reading I was incandescent (not a word to use lightly for fear of mis-spelling) and have since come up with more and more reasons to be annoyed.
Bats Need Friends. Seen it on car stickers, and it is undoubtedly true. More or less all of the sixteen British breeding species are in trouble for a selection of reasons.
Destruction of the countryside. Grubbing up hedgerows disrupts patrol routes (bats follow lines of cover) and removes reservoirs of prey. Felling woodlands removes breeding sites and more hunting habitat. Most inexcusably, the guardians of the remaining green stuff increasingly "tidy up" the countryside, removing old and rotting trees for health and safety reasons. Health and safety? Can we not afford the risk of losing a few of our sixty-five million humans in order to make space for a few hundred thousand struggling bats?
Sealing of our own environment. Better sealed buildings with fewer gaps for bats to get under eaves, less tolerance of those already there, concreting over entrances to - well, everything, really, for fear again of hurt to one of those more-pernicious-than-rats hairless apes.
Insecticides applied on industrial scale to crop monocultures remove vast quantities of potential prey from the environment. Today I can drive across Britain overnight or during the day with a bare minimum use of screen wash, where thirty years ago the accumulation of insect body fluids drying on the windscreen would eventually force a stop and wipe by cloth regardless of use of screenwash and wipers.
Bats need friends. They have an unsavoury reputation among many of the public: they are active "during those hours when the powers of evil are exalted" (I'm re-reading Hound of the Baskervilles), some consider them flying rats, there is the whole Dracula thing, their wings are leathery and their colours subdued, they will chitter and leave droppings in your loft and so on.
I've been on a few bat trips now, both guided walks and box checks: and the majority of those offering such services are informative, helpful, eager to convey their enthusiasm and the conservation message, and recognise the natural alliance between active conservationists and those who spectate on wildlife either occasionally, desultorily or, like me and many of you, relentlessly. One thing noted not by me but others, however, is the extent to which bat people stuff the law down your throat, entirely unlike the approach of even the least compromising of RSPB wardens.
All of this, however, is more or less irrelevant to a vagrant bat, making no more than a pit stop in an abandoned public-access WWII pillbox on the North Norfolk coast.
News broke progressively and I left the wedding I was attending only after the service - but before the reception of course! By then the promise was of an organised viewing at dusk. Bloody good. I've had organised viewings of bats, a licensed batter brings the thing round, points out ID criteria, permits photography and everyone from a grockle who saw an interesting ad in the paper to a rabid lister like me gets a fascinating experience THAT THEY TAKE TO OTHER PEOPLE AND SPREAD A FAVOURABLE MESSAGE ABOUT AN ANIMAL THAT NEEDS FRIENDS!
Try googling "Parti-coloured Bat in Norfolk" and read the article. It has a photograph of the actual bat, and the name of the photographer is suppressed. Unusual, normally a photo-credit for gripping purposes is welcome. It is also made clear that the reason the bat went missing between 1800 and 1810 is because it was removed by a batter.
The facts are bare, but there are some indications. I think we may draw a few inferences.
Whoever removed that bat walked in without obvious gear such as nets, plucked the bat off the wall by hand, stuffed it in a cloth bag and walked out past the crowd on the beach without saying anything. So much for an organised viewing at dusk. The bat was removed with about an hour to go till dusk after it had spent the afternoon roosting quite contentedly.
It is suggested it was removed to prevent disturbance. By all accounts people had been in and out of the pillbox all afternoon, taking pix, and the bat hadn't moved an inch. It is one hundred percent clear that it was undisturbed in actual fact if not legal definition.
Now I come to my personal circumstances, which in relation to ticking and bat welfare don't matter a Mohne. At 1800 I was still travelling away from the wedding and towards Kelling. I had over an hour to go. If the son of a lipsticked pit bull that removed the bat had at least had the common decency to mention the fact so a pager message was issued I could have turned round immediately and been back at the party at least two and maybe three hours earlier than I actually was. Others who travelled considerable distances to dip could also have turned around.
It is fair to say also that RBA (other information services are available), who provide a service that I trust to an extraordinary extent, have been badly let down by someone over this. If there was no intention to organise a viewing, why was it announced there would be? If the plan was changed, when, by whom, and why was it not announced?
I am all in favour of bat conservation and many of the people involved in it. But this harks back to the worst days of conservation arrogance. Bats need friends. Only an idiot alienates those who already are friends of bats. Bird reserves have learned that there is conservation gold in twitchers. Some even notice that it is the interested birder who acts as the ambassador for conservation. However an alliance has partners, and just now I don't feel like one. I suspect that there may be some weird bat ringing-tick thing going on, or at least a form of one-upmanship or plain selfishness. It sure has nothing to do with bat welfare. Bat might have flown out early and been picked off by a raptor? Raptors have to eat something, that might have saved a British endangered individual something. What a load of (insert own choice here).
I can only suggest that if you find a rare bat that has no conservation significance (indeed some still argue that vagrants cannot be a loss to the species as they are doing it wrong already) and you want to share your good fortune, do not under any circumstances tell anyone in the bat world. Keep it to the birding community.
John
