Nature Fix is proudly sponsored by Crag Hoppers, one of the UK's
favourite outdoor gear experts. Crag Hoppers and the National
Trust have joined forces to create a collection inspired by
nature and designed for life.
Sales from the range help to support the National Trust's
vital work, restoring some of our incredible natural
landscapes, from delicate wetlands to boggy peatlands.
Together, we are working to look after nature and care for our
landscapes. For generations to come.
Hello and welcome to Nature Fix with me Claire Hickenbotham.
Every month we take you with us as we meet the people who spend
their time outside and join them in a place that most inspires
them. The sun is setting and we're entering an unusual
wildlife haven, Arnis Vale Cemetery in the middle of the
urban hustle of Bristol.
Dr Parvati Venugopal is taking us on a mission to find one of
our most charismatic and misunderstood creatures of the
night, bats. So mind your step and look up as we enter the
twilight hour in search of our fluttering and slightly freaky
friends.
Wherever you may be, whether it 's the countryside or a city,
the chances are you're not far away from the wildlife that I'm
looking for tonight. I have come to Bristol and I'm walking down
a path with a lot of street art on it, which I think is really
synonymous with Bristol.
But I'm heading to a quite unusual city location to get a
glimpse of an enigmatic animal, bats. And to find them, I'm
going to be meeting an expert from the Bat Conservation Trust.
Hi!
Nice to meet you.
You too. I am from the Bat Conservation Trust. I Am
Parvati. I work in the National Bat Monitoring Programme.
Fantastic. So where are we going to tonight?
So I think my plan is just to take you to this very pretty
symmetry. I don't know whether the pretty and symmetry words go
together.
It's a very pretty cemetery, a big one in Bristol, Arnesvale.
But we are going to take a sort of urban set-up route. We walk
through the backside of the Sainsbury's and then finally get
into the cemetery and look for some bats, if we are lucky.
Fantastic. So you must lead the way. We've come from quite a
residential part of the city, haven't we? Yes. So lots of
Victorian terraced housing. So we're just skirting around the
supermarket car park.
Lovely birdsongs.
What can you hear? Are you good at recognising the birds?
I can see a blackbird on top of the tree.
So I don't. Oh, there he is.
We're just coming up to a busy road. So I have a confession to
make. I don't know a lot about bats, and I'm a little bit
scared of bats.
That's absolutely fine. You're not the only one, actually. Many
people are the same, like me personally. I was not scared of
bats when I was a child, but I didn't like them. The reason
behind that was, I'm from south of India, so I studied in a
village school.
Classroom roofs were like, you know, tiled ones, and we got
this little, tiny, teeny black creatures in them. They often
stained my white and blue uniform most of the days with
their urine or poo. So I didn't like them at all.
I think that's fair. So when did the love of nature start?
I think I got that from my parents because my mum, she
loves gardening. She still has a really good vegetable garden.
And my dad, he was an environmental activist. So he
used to take me with him when he goes to schools or places where
he gives talk.
So your dad? Kind of started that love.
Started that love in me. And also I come from a villagey
area, so my house was next to a paddy field. So we used to go
and play in the paddy field after the harvest. So it was,
you know, always out there, very accessible back in India. There
was two routes mostly during that time. Either you go medical
field or engineering. I didn't get a place in a government
college to study.
Medical degree. Then I was scrolling through the handbook
what other courses they offer and I landed on this course
called forestry. I thought oh wow I can go to forest. I told
my parents like okay I'm gonna go take that course. They were
not really happy because they didn't know where I'm going to
land.
But then they sort of trusted me and like whatever they wanted
was like just, you know, having a good education. During my
master's, by accident, I did a project on bats. And that's when
I first handled a bat. That's when I'm like, oh my God, these
are so cute. So if you handle them properly, they were like
really, you know, snuggly and snuffly.
Really fluffy and that's sort of realization like oh I like
working in this area I love studying about nature so I sort
of like I often say I took the wrong train but somehow I landed
the right destination that's a really nice saying I like that
well we're nearly at the cemetery now so you're taking me
to Arnus Vale Cemetery yes we're just going through the gates and
oh my words I I mean...
There are some very big structures in here. Tombs,
mausoleums.
Yeah, and I can see some tombs are taller than me.
It's absolutely fantastic. We've got this lovely patch of green
grass in front of us, which looks like there are more modern
graves here. But this is like a Victorian cemetery, isn't it?
Yes.
Because we think of bats and cemeteries as being quite a good
mix because of some of the myths, don't we? So are they
making a home in the cemetery because there are lots of places
where they can roost?
Yeah, exactly. So they can just They can find a home in old
mature trees or in buildings. We have seen quite a lot of old
Victorian-type buildings in the cemetery. So they can find a
home, plus they can just go out and get easy dinner. There are a
lot of insects over here. You don't need to commute that far
to get your dinner every night.
So this is a perfect location for bats. And bats are really
sort of cosmopolitan. They can habitat anywhere. Except
Antarctica, they are in all continents, and that makes them
the second largest mammalian order after rodents. So there
are so many cool, amazing facts about them.
Last winter, I went out in one of the caves in the Mendhip
Hills around Bristol doing a hibernation survey, and I
learned a new fact about bats there. So they can just hang
upside down just with one foot.
Sleeping completely without dropping off from the ceiling so
that they have a special kind of lock in their foot which keeps
them there. Even if they are dead, they can still hang sort
of upside down. Yeah, so it's like every time when I meet
another bat person who is interested in bats, I learn new
things.
Okay, so I'm just going to check the time because it's nine
o'clock in the evening now. This is going to be the perfect time.
Sunset time already?
It's about sunset, isn't it?
I'm hoping we might start seeing some pipistrelles because that's
one of the species that comes out early in the evening, just
before the sunset or soon after the sunset.
So how big are they?
So they are like the size of your thumb.
Oh, so really tiny.
Really tiny. So the smallest bat in the UK is the soprano
pipistrelle, which with the wing folder you can fit them into a
matchbox They're just like a two-pound coin weight. Bats use
a sort of special skill of theirs called echolocation. So
they emit sound waves and they listen for the echoes coming
back on any sort of objects.
The bat echolocation calls are ultrasound. That means our human
ears are not very able to listen to that frequency. We can only
hear up to 20 kilohertz. Most of the bats they call a bow 20
kilohertz so we need help of the special equipment called bat
detectors.
Got a little bit of kit here, a bat detector.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm going to describe it as like an old-fashioned mobile phone.
It's a bit brick-like but it's about the size of a mobile
phone, isn't it? So you can fit it in your pocket or your bag.
This is a very cheap one I'm using which is called
heterodyne.
You can get this just at... Detectors from starting from 60
pounds. What this does, it says I have a frequency dial here so
I can turn the frequency up and down and each bat species has
got specific peak frequencies like, you know, I have a unique
voice and you do and same as to bats.
I can't see anything flying up here but I'm just gonna turn
the...
Shall we carry on? Because I've got a funny feeling that we're
going to have a fantastic view when we've got to the top of
this hill.
Yeah.
And the light is very quickly going, isn't it? We'll keep our
eyes to the treetops, I guess.
Is the best place that we might see them.
So do you bring people on back walks?
When I go to London and take people out, we did one in
partnership with the Royal Parks last year.
What are people's reactions when they see them and they're a bit
more tuned in to what they're experiencing?
Yeah, that's what surprised me because most people attended
that event, they never knew there are bats in London. And
when they hear bats in a detector, they're like, oh wow,
that's so cool. And then they straight look up in the sky so
they can see them.
Because, you know, if you go on a walk in an evening like this,
you never... Look up that often, do you? So you can easily miss
out things flying past. But when they saw that, it's just like
they were all excited.
Do you think being in a city is a bit of a barrier to accessing
nature or is it just about knowing where to look for it?
That's a sort of common myth, isn't it? If you are in a city,
you don't get any wildlife, which is not true. You need to
go to a green space or sometimes they can come to your garden if
you... Look out after sunset, if you see these little things
flying around and around, that might be a bat.
So in the UK we've got 17 breeding species of bats. And in
London you could get, I think it 's 13 or 14, I might be wrong
but I need to check, but that many numbers, more than half of
the total bats in the UK you get in the middle of London.
And that's in London, we're in Bristol, so it's a really nice
way to access nature. On your doorstep in the city, isn't it?
Yes, yeah, yeah.
So what would you say to people to encourage them to come out at
this time of night and to do this sort of thing?
For me personally, going out in the park or, you know, just
being out in the nature calms me down after a long day of work.
It brings peace. It's very sort of, I don't know, serene.
So even the fresh air really calms me down and I get like my
brain suddenly feels like oh wow just woke up sort of feeling do
you feel like that's something that you need to actively have
in your life yes especially after coming here because I'm
far away from my family or close friends I do have really good
friends here but still you know going out for a walk Especially
doing bat walks like this often introduce me to people, sort of
like like-minded people.
So there's always a chance to meet a new person and make
friends. So we are walking through the park now, but we are
sort of heading to the open bit of the park. So hopefully we can
see more displays there.
As you're saying that, we're listening to a bird and I don't
know whether it's a crow, but I'm feeling like it's just
adding to that atmosphere of the sun is going down, we've got the
spooky birds in the background and we're talking about bats. So
why are so many of the things we associate with bats bad and dark
and spooky?
I think it's mainly to do with, you know, not knowing about them
because... They wake up at night by the time we go to bed. So you
never see them. People more talk about birds or big animals like
tigers, elephants, because you can see them. They're very
charismatic, but bats are mostly black in colour. At night, dark,
you don't see them. So it's quite easy to come up with all
these myths.
Just a sort of fear side, I guess. Another myth about bats
is that people think that they drink blood. But as I mentioned,
there are 1,400 more than that bats in the world and only three
of them drink cattle blood and they're all in South And Central
America. So you don't need to be afraid going out in this country
and looking for bats. Yeah.
Where should we go then next to have a look?
I think we should head down to there so you can come out of
this woody bit. Oh, I can see that bear. Just flew. I think it
's a pipistrelle. It was very small, flying very quick.
Oh, and now I've got something.
Yeah, can you hear that?
And I think I saw it just come right across in front of us.
Can you hear that?
Yeah, I can.
Oh yeah, can you see that? Yes.
That's incredible.
Yes, yes.
And he actually went quite close to us, didn't he?
Yes, yeah, yeah.
So that's the bit I'm scared of. This is going to sound
ridiculous, but I'm really scared of them getting tangled
in my hair.
You know what, I would say the second most popular myth about
bats, because most people think that they can get stuck in your
hair. If they can detect a teeny tiny mosquito in the dark, they
can definitely detect you on your head.
Oh yeah, another one. Oh my gosh.
So we've got two or three now, criss-crossing each other. They
look bigger than you described them. Yes, yes. Because of that
wingspan, I guess.
Yes.
And these are all the same sorts of bats we're hearing?
Yeah, I think they are soprano pipistrelle because we are
getting the loudest sound at 55 kilohertz. So if I go down to
45, yeah, I think we've got both species. Common pipistrelle and
soprano pipistrelle.
So the bats are eating insects?
Yes. All the UK bats feed on insects.
Do they eat anything else?
Yeah, some bats, they do eat spiders. There are species, they
eat fishes and big sort of beetles.
Who are the bats' predators?
You'll be surprised with my answer. So here in the UK, most
of the bat kills, of course, they face quite a lot of threats
like habitat fragmentation and destruction of old...
Mature trees or buildings but cats are another one yeah they
attack bats they catch them sometimes from the roost
especially so if you have a bat roost in your house the cats can
easily catch them sometimes in some tropics especially spiders
can also feed on bats if they get a sort of bat tangled in the
spider web.
And it depends on size. Yeah, exactly.
We're getting a constant stream now, aren't we?
Yeah.
I'm so glad I can see your excitement.
I am excited and I'm not scared I don't know if because they're
small enough.
Yes.
So you can hear them before you see them.
Yeah exactly. So you kind of know where to look. You can
prepare your mind.
So they'll start heading in now as the light goes even more
they'll go into the trees will they?
Yes yeah where they can find more insects into the woods.
I feel like we've been here at prime back dinner time.
Yes yeah dinner time yeah.
We've got them. Great flurry of them in the cemetery and you
know I reckon we've probably got 20 minutes of daylight left and
we want to be out of here. So should we turn our bat detector
off because we know what we're looking for now don't we? And
should we start heading back down?
Yeah back down.
Are you very pleased that we've seen them? I am actually, yeah
yeah.
How are you feeling now about them?
Well I feel genuinely like really excited.
Yeah.
The thing that we came to see, we've seen.
Yes. And like you said.
In so much of nature, sometimes that doesn't happen, does it?
But I feel more love for them than I did at the beginning of
the night, which I guess is your aim, isn't it?
Yes.
We've found the back gate, so this is the way out. Amazing
view of Bristol, actually.
With the twinkling lights as the city kind of wakes up for the
evening. We're emerging out of the park now, back onto the busy
city streets, to the petrol station and the pub. And it's
just another marker, really, of how close nature is to an urban
centre and how accessible it is, I guess.
Absolutely, yeah.
What would be your final thought for people to encourage them to
come out?
Sort of be open and just go and explore what's out there in your
local area. Because we don't have that many wildlife left in
this world, so you are very lucky to see them, observe them,
so don't miss the chance.
If you're planning on going bat spotting, they're busy settling
down for the winter right now, but April to October is a great
time to spot them. Please stay safe if you're exploring in the
dark. Take a Torch and a buddy with you. And make sure you
follow bat protection guidance.
Check out the Bat Conservation Trust website for everything you
ever need to know about bats. Thanks for listening to Nature
Fix. We'll be back next month with a new episode. And in the
meantime, why not have a listen to our other nature podcast,
Wild Tales. Bye for now.
Nature Fix is proudly sponsored by outdoor gear experts, Crag
Hoppers. Heading out for adventure? Discover Crag Hoppers
National Trust range of clothing and accessories. Inspired by
nature and designed to last, each item in the collection
comes with a guarantee for life.
And with every purchase, you're helping to support the Trust's
vital work restoring our natural landscapes. Get ready for your
journey outdoors at craghoppers.com forward slash
national hyphen Trust.
You Thank you.