Keeping track of the bats by tapping into their sonar

ANOTHER LIFE:'LITTLE LUMPS that fly in the air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;/ Wings like bits of umbrella." Goodness knows what DH Lawrence would have made of bat faces in close-up, that bristling, animated mixture of ferocity and innocence. How odd, in a way, that tiny mammal faces, so totally without meaning for their insect prey, should make such impact on mammals a hundred times their size.

Few enough of us, of course, have ever looked a wide-awake bat closely in the eye. I write this fresh from watching, on computer, indignant visages of Ireland’s bats clasped firmly but gently between various pairs of knuckles and presented to the viewer at sometimes awesomely intimate size.

The new DVD, The Bats of Ireland, "an interactive guide on how to identify, study, appreciate and care for Irish bats", is the work of the naturalist Conor Kelleher and film-maker Jim Wilson, with the help of fellow enthusiasts in the Cork Bat Group and elsewhere. Its production, in aid of Bat Conservation Ireland, finds research into the animals, both professional and amateur, reaching something of a modern heyday. It's also out to win more popular interest, sympathy and concern for the creatures that, as Kelleher says, have historically had a bad press.

“Bats are worth watching,” wrote CB Moffat, Dublin newspaperman and naturalist, a century ago, “and have secrets in their economy which must be found out by watching, and which the most skilful scrutiny of the largest series of dead specimens will not suffice to disclose.”

It was not, however, until well into the 1980s that Irish zoologists took much notice. Then, prompted by European worries about bat decline, there was a first national survey by Dúchas (now the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS).

It gave priority to the west of Ireland’s lesser horseshoe bat (see drawing, right) that is largely lost to the Continent. University College, Galway became a focus for bat work, under the lively leadership of Prof James Fairley, long a student of Ireland’s furry animals. One of his graduates, Dr Kate McAney, is now guardian of the roosts of the lesser horseshoe, funded by the UK’s Vincent Wildlife Trust.

What has specially fired the amateur enthusiast, however, with bat groups formed in Dublin, Galway and Cork, has been hand-held detectors that make audible the echolocating calls of bats on the wing and that light up with sonagrams from which species can be identified. In his book A Basket of Weasels(self-published in Belfast in 2001), James Fairley shares the thrill: "You are standing on a bridge over a slow-flowing stream on a balmy summer night, when all is silent save for the faint swish and gurgle of the water and the gentle rustle of leaves on the nearby trees. Then you switch on the detector and the evening is flooded with sound . . ."

Since the 1980s, the long-accepted total of seven Irish bat species has grown to 10, with the latest addition of Brandt’s bat, first discovered in Co Wicklow in 2003 (you tell it from the whiskered bat by close – and careful – scrutiny of its third upper pre-molars, but ultimately it may need proof by DNA).

Mapping where our bats are and their use of hedges, woods, streams and bridges has grown quite intensive. For Daubenton’s bat, for example, one that plucks insects from rivers, some 280 watery sites in every Irish county have been surveyed by volunteer teams. Other volunteers, in cars fitted with bat-call recorders, have been patrolling 20-mile stretches spaced across the island. And last year Bat Conservation Ireland added a further national field survey, Batlas 2010, that has continued, somewhat uncomfortably, this summer.

As if all this volunteer effort were not enough, the NPWS has funded an all-Ireland Centre for Irish Bat Research, an academic partnership by UCD and Queen’s. Its scientists are looking first at the island’s rarest bats – Brandt’s, whiskered and Natterer’s – about whose lives in Ireland virtually nothing is known.

The new DVD, totalling 83 minutes, is visually most creative and an excellent aid to telling one bat from another, in the night sky or the gloved hand. It briefs about bat boxes, and how you rescue the bat that has suddenly appeared on your conservatory floor or taken refuge in the curtains. Great information, indeed, if often narrated at rather too much of a low-pitched, Cork-accented gallop. Like listening to bats, perhaps, it takes time to tune in and absorb, but this DVD is, in any case, one to be played many times over by eager recruits to the cause.

The Bats of IrelandDVD is available from Conor Kelleher at Spring Lane, Carrigagulla, Ballinagree, Macroom, Co Cork, price €15 plus pp. E-mail: conorkelleher@eircom.net