green & pleasant Thornbury

As winter approaches we encounter Halloween or All Hallows Eve, originally a Celtic celebration to mark the beginning of the cold and barren part of the year. Bats have long been associated with the festival but the connection is far less ominous than some would suspect. In Halloweens origins people would gather around camp fires to ward off evil spirits. Attracted to the warmth and bright lights of these fires were many small flying insects, natural food for hungry bats. People saw them flickering in and out of the firelight and eventually they became a feature of the festival.

Much more sinister is the Bat survey carried out by Barratts at Park Farm.

Bats are a protected species which means that developers when submitting planning applications are required to carry out ecological surveys to ensure that they or their habitat are not endangered in any way. The survey report they had prepared included statements such as :-

• no bats were seen to emerge from potential roost sites'
• 'a small number of Pipistrelle bats were recorded'
• 'surveys recorded a small number of bat species using the site'

The story that follows is a true account of personal experience at Park Farm:-

Bats Reunited” – A True Story by Jennie Bennett”.

It was an early summer evening and I saw something fall in front of our window and thought straight away that it might be a bat, because for nights Luke (my youngest son) and I had been watching them come out every night from the main bedroom window, looking up to the tiles you can see them come out one by one. I ran outside into the front garden and it was a little bat who'd crawled along the ground and up the house bricks and tucked herself under the window sill. I didn't know what to do at first but felt it better if I left her there in case she was rescued that evening by her family. I went straight out early the following morning but she was still there, only shrivelled up and lifeless. I put her in a shoebox and on some cotton wool and called the Bat Group to ask their advice. To be honest I thought she was dead. They told me to keep her somewhere cold and return her to them in an envelope they'd provide, so they could identify the bat species. I left her in the box for a few hours and then thought I'd better check on her to make sure she was definitely dead and put her in a sealed bag in the fridge. However, on saying our last goodbyes, I was amazed to see a very faint pulse, very excitedly I called the Bat Group back for further advice.Basically being out all night she was hypothermic and dehydrated. I used a hot water bottle placed under the box to warm her through for several hours. I had to melt some honey with hot water, cool it and feed it to her from the corner of a piece of kitchen roll. And unbelievably she licked it from the piece of kitchen roll, she was so small and I felt in awe of this little thing. I left her in the box until the young volunteer couple came over to us from Charfield to help us set her free and check her over. When they arrived, we sat and they handled her and she crawled all over them, they identified her as a young girl, and fed her some mealworms, which she loved. They explained that when they are all getting ready to leave the roost, they can get excited and felt she may have been knocked out accidentally. Before they come out, you can hear them up there, it's like they're chattering. At 9.30pm, which was the time the bats were leaving their roost each night, we went outside with her. The young man held her up and told me there were recordings being read from her cries to them and their communications to her and over 1000 bat calls recorded that night. The bats left our tiles one by one, and we were counting, over 80 bats left our house that night, never had we counted so many. They flew around us and back up, knowing that we had her. Then she went, she flew all the way up in front of the houses and then back to our house, landing on one of the tile fronts and then crawled back up into the roost - Fantastic!!! Still thinking about it now makes me feel emotional.

How different in tone to the reports submitted by Barratts with their planninig application. It seems by comparison that the presence of this protected species has been deliberately downplayed to suit a purpose.

Interestingly the same survey in a description of the site described ‘a small shallow stream’ flowing westward across the site. Can this be the same stream featured last week which the Environmental Agency is so concerned about under the heading ‘Flooding’. Can this be the same stream which acts as a surface water drain for Thornbury and flows via Oldbury and causes the residents there considerable disquiet. If so it must be that Barratts don’t have surveys done after it has been raining.