Natural wonders to watch out forf thishi week…k

Late nights have been in short supply during the pandemic. But last Friday evening, I left a socially distanced supper at a friend’s house at the joyfully anarchic hour of 2am and walked through the woods separating our homes.

A few hectares of woodland spanning a steep scarp face (this is Sheffield, city of seven hills), Brincliffe Edge Wood is home to an abundance of wildlife. There are woodpeckers, bullfinch and a rogue dive-bombing crow called Russell. But it’s at night when these woods truly come alive.

Tawny owls roost here, and on summer evenings we leave our bedroom window open to hear their ethereal cries.

Badgers and foxes also slink through the undergrowth. The latter have eked out a route from the woods straight to our back garden, where in previous years they have managed to break into our chicken coop in a murderous frenzy of destruction.

Anyway, on that sultry evening, I encountered a different creature of the night: bats, wheeling from the shadowy beech trees with all the unpredictability of a badly folded paper aeroplane.

I presumed them to be pipistrelle bats, the most common of the UK’s 18 species, due to their jerky movements and the fact they were flying near street lights.

Artificial lighting (as well as habitat destruction) has been blamed for the decline in bat populations over the past half-century and some particularly sensitive species will refuse to fly anywhere near lamp posts.

The decline in insect populations has also played its part in threatening bats, too.

Pipistrelle bats weigh just 8g and have a wingspan of around 23cm (9in), but all the same can devour 3,000 insects in a single evening. They can be spotted all over the country and roost in rural and urban areas: in tree hollows, the underside of bridges or other such man-made fortifications, far from the madding crowd.

While they are present in Britain all year round, late summer and early autumn is the ideal time to spot bats.

It marks the onset of the mating season, when males begin to emit the strange clicks and purrs they hope will entice a female before hibernation commences.

Already suffering with a bit of an image problem, bats have had a particularly bad time in 2020. Scientists believe Covid-19 originated in bats before jumping into the human population via an intermediary species (the pangolin is the prime suspect).

While research continues into the origins of Covid-19, the 2002 Sars outbreak is known to have moved from horseshoe bats to civets (a catlike nocturnal mammal) before infecting humans.

In the UK, only one socalled zoonotic disease is associated with any of our bat species: a rabies virus called European bat lyssavirus found in Daubenton’s bats. However, there has only ever been one case of an infection in Britain and unless you handle bats, it is extremely unlikely.

Still, for some, bats remain the stuff of nightmares. Something to be cast in rubber and dangled on string each Hallowe’en, or to imagine tangled in hair.

Such phobias lie far from the truth and hint towards something deeper within us: a fear of the dark and all the mysteries it harbours.