Another Life: At one of those oddly warm daybreaks just before the clocks went back, I glanced up from my muesli to see a full quadrille of bats in swirling silhouette against the first light over the mountain, writes Michael Viney.
In summer, swallows from the woodshed had been hawking for midges in just the same space beside the oak trees. Now, pipistrelles were tempted out to hunt: perhaps a final flight before their hibernation.
Though we live with bats, our few encounters in the year are always a surprise. The little mound of droppings on a corner of an outside window sill, the odd squeak and shuffle above the ceiling in the loo are reminders of our lodgers, but we keep rather different hours. There is contentment in a simple awareness of shared lives. (A friend has badgers living next door in a bramble thicket. They gather bedding material from the bottom of his hedges, leaving long trails of wispy grass across his lawn. He has never met one; he just enjoys them being there.) More and more people, I'm glad to say, just enjoy bats being there, now that silly, traditional shivers about them have abated. This is greatly due to the public enthusiasm of Ireland's young women bat researchers, such as Kate McAney and Caroline Shiel, demonstrably unafraid of hair entanglement, or of handling furry miniatures with ferocious little faces. No other family of mammals on this island has had quite the same intensity of study in the past two or three decades.
When this column began, in 1977, Ireland had seven kinds of bat: pipistrelle, long-eared, whiskered, lesser horseshoe, Natterer's, Daubenton's and Leisler's. Now we know we have another three, all in the smallest size, about 4cm long. Two of them are extra kinds of pipistrelle - Nathusius's, a settler from Europe, and the soprano pipistrelle, whose higher pitch of hunting call waited upon the use of electronic bat detectors.
Most recently-discovered of the three is Brandt's bat, a species so close to the whiskered bat that telling them apart needs a sharp eye for detail. "On the lower jaw of the Brandt's bat," says one authoritative source, "the third premolar is greater than half the size of the second premolar." And if that doesn't clinch it, the adult male has a club-shaped penis while the whiskered bat has a thinner one with parallel sides.
Trying to examine either by torchlight in a windy wood can be taxing, which may be why the researchers who trapped one at an international bat workshop in Killarney National Park in August sent it for DNA analysis. Duly authenticated, it became the first record in the south-west and confirmed the park as the one place in Ireland to boast the whole roster of the island's bats.
Brandt's bat is now known to range in a narrow band across the map from Killarney to Vladivostok in Russia, but in Europe it faces the same threats that put so many species at risk: loss of roosting habitat in roofs and dead trees, lethal timber treatments, grubbing out of hedgerows and the rest. But the sustained conservation campaign by bat groups and the National Parks and Wildlife Service is beginning to pay off, particularly in its influence on local authorities.
Daubenton's bat, for example, is the one that skims low over tree-bordered pools, canals and slow rivers, gaffing emerging insects with its oversize feet. It roosts in spring and summer in crevices under the arches of old masonry bridges and raises its single offspring there. Until recently, however, one after another of these bridges was being strengthened to withstand today's traffic by pressure-grouting the arches with liquid cement, often coating the stonework to a depth of several centimetres.
Urgent surveys, some funded by the Heritage Council, found that not only Daubenton's, but Natterer's and several other bats were roosting under bridges at intervals during the year.
In Co Sligo, for example, Caroline Shiel of Bat Conservation Ireland examined the beautiful, five-arch Lisconny Bridge spanning the Unshin River and found a long-established nursery roost of some 25 Daubenton's bats, first recorded in 1988.
As a scheduled strengthening drew near, in 2003, she was contracted by Sligo County Council to liaise with the firm restoring the bridge, Leamac of Cork. Its engineers were shown bats roosting under three separate arches, and they co-operated readily, not only preserving key crevices and keeping the nursery roost open, but working carefully to leave the fine old stonework exposed.
The 2004 bat season saw a mere four bats returning to the nursery crevice - but July this year found a full colony of 25 Daubenton's, complete with young. It can be done.