Make a bat buddy
It pays to have a plot that’s inviting for them
Despite what Bram Stoker would have us believe, Europe’s bats don’t drink blood. Or eat fruit, for that matter! They eat insects. So, I’d say all of the 17 UK species really deserve ‘gardeners’ friend’ status, along with ladybirds and lacewings.
All that flying uses up lots of energy, so a tiny pipistrelle (which weighs less than a pound coin) needs to eat more than 3,000 insects a night. I suppose that impressive, gnat-munching effort goes unsung because bats are working the night shift. Indeed, because bats are nocturnal, people often don’t realise they’re around, but there’s a good chance they hunt in the airspace over your garden, whether you live in the country, city or somewhere in between.
The choices we make about our gardens can have a big influence on bats. The UK’s gardens are very important to them; if you could stick all these gardens together, you’d create a park that was bigger than all the National Parks combined.
The most useful thing you can do to help bats is to ensure your garden offers up a lot of insects for them to eat and that it’s home to a wide range of them. By ‘range’, I mean diversity. Different bat species specialise in hunting prey of all sorts of shapes and sizes, so a good range of dining options is best.
Here are some other ways to have a bat-friendly plot:
Grow lots of different shape flowers to attract a wide variety of insects.
Include night-scented flowering plants as they’ll bring flying insects to your garden.
Make your garden multi-level. Taller flowers, shrubs and climbers are more useful to bats.
Pale-coloured flowers are easier for insects to find at dusk than dark ones.
Hybrids and exotics are fine, but native species are more useful to more insects (for example, as a food source for caterpillars).
If your garden doesn’t have a pond or wet area, get digging!