We knew we had bats at Cadbury as the previous owners had told us and today we finally took a peep in the attic to see what we could see… well, huge excitement all round as we spotted several ‘groups’ hanging from rafters or tucked under the eaves and on taking photos, discovered that we probably have TWO different species!! What we cannot do with any degree of certainty is identify them as a) our photos are not good enough and b) bats are apparently very hard to identify anyway. Based on looking through our identification books and googling various sites we might hazard a guess at Natterer’s Bats or Brandt’s Bats for the left photo and Long-eared Bats for the right BUT we could be way off-mark here.
Bats are protected and as such we cannot kill, evict or in any way disrupt their normal day to day living in our roof. IF we needed to remove them for any reason, this has to be done in such a way that ALL bats are rehomed somewhere and none are killed. Advice should be sought from the Bat Conservation Trust on this (where committed volunteers can apparently guide you through what needs to happen).
We have ZERO plans to remove these animals, we may have an attic (or two) that is fairly well covered in bat poo but what a privilege to have a roof that homes such intriguing creatures. In all likelihood, they will be gone by the winter as they use different places for summer roosting (and bringing up their pups/young) and winter hibernation. This means we get the chance to do some cleaning in the winter – but again we may seek advice on that one.
Some bats are far more common than others but most can be found all over the UK (we have 18 different species – there are 1300 in total) but as a whole they are a rare and protected species whose numbers tend to decline year on year. Fingers crossed ours stay!!