Rare bats given helping hand by local charity
FARMERS and landowners with endangered greater horseshoe bats on their land have agreed to make changes to the way they manage their farms to improve the survival chances of the rare mammals.
A pioneering five-year conservation project involved conservationists visiting more than 450 farms across Devon to identify sites where the bats make their home.
Devon Wildlife Trust has now completed the study and has revealed that 95% of the landowners were the bats live have agreed to make changes to their land management to help the bats on their farms.
“This resulted in more than 16,000 hectares of the Devon countryside becoming better for bats,” a spokesman for the charity said.
The greater horseshoe bats have been the focus of an initiative led by the charity since 2015. It has worked alongside communities across the county to help the struggling nocturnal species, which saw its population shrink in the UK by around 90% during the 20th century.
The project, which has been supported by the National Heritage Lottery Fund and a coalition of local partners, solved this absence of information by launching an annual ‘Devon Bat Survey’, mobilising an army of volunteers who used specialist bat recording equipment provided by the project to discover more about the species’ habits.
Over the five years of the project, some 2,500 volunteer surveys were conducted in every corner of the county. These yielded more than 3.8 million bat records, each of them a recording of the sounds made by bats as they navigate their way around at night.
As there are more than a dozen different bat species commonly found in Devon, the project team had to undertake the task of sifting through therecords looking for those made by greater horseshoe bats.
Their hard work paid off, as 774 new records of the rare bats were identified. Mapped on to the Devon landscape, the project was able to produce a detailed guide to where greater horseshoes are most active, including crucial information as to the main flightpaths used to find their insect food.
Anna David, Devon Greater Horseshoe Bat Project’s Lead, said: “We’ve been able to achieve so much for greater horseshoe bats over the course of the past five years, principally because of the willingness of local people to help us.
“We are confident that the effort we have put in over the last five years will continue through our project partners, landowners and communities, who are now so much more aware of and equipped to look after this special species into the future.”
To find out more about the work of the Devon Greater Horseshoe Bat Project, go to www.devonbatproject.org