One woman's fascination with bats

“Are you squeamish about bats?” Sally booms down the bat-phone when I call her to arrange a visit to her rescue centre in deepest Upton.

“No,” I lie. By this I mean that while I wish them absolutely no harm and love watching them flittering round my garden, I don’t want them on me or too near me because of an irrational fear that I might hurt them.

“Well,” says Sally, “If you don’t like them, don’t let it show on your face.” Bats, she says, are not blind and can be discomforted by our facial expression.

Who knew? Certainly not me but after a few minutes with Sally, the bat-facts come thick, fast and fascinating. Did I know that a third of all the world’s mammals are bats? I did not. Just like I didn’t know that some species of bats can live well into their thirties and the age of Europe’s oldest bat is recorded at 42.

Sally trained in veterinary care but started rescuing bats shortly after receiving her handling licence in 2006 although, she says: “I’ve been fascinated by them ever since I was a little girl. I would stand on my tiptoes looking out of my bedroom window, wondering which individual species they were.”

The bat licence isn’t some silly piece of bureaucracy; it’s all part of the beefed-up regulations concerning bats and their habitats that can land you in very hot water if you break them. Thankfully I wouldn’t be allowed to touch one even if I wanted to.

Sally performed her first rescue in a bathroom after a distracted woman called to say a bat had crawled out of her plughole. “It was a Pipistrelle,” says Sally. She managed to fish the tiny thing; barely bigger or heavier than a cotton-wool ball, out of the sink.

“It was all covered in slime and did look a bit creepy,” she says, “It must have come in through the window.”

From that first incident came the idea for East Dorset Bat Rescue and Rehabilitation, a 24/7 service that aids bats which have suffered cat attacks, damaged roosts; old-style cavity wall insulation was a particular shocker: “The bats were entombed,” injuries caused by vehicle-strike, and lost or abandoned pups.

Bats only have one pup at a time and don’t breed every year. Add to this the fact that 50 per cent of pups die in their first twelve months and you can see that the hundred or so bats Sally’s group rescues each year are vital for the local population, particularly as Dorset is one of the few counties where all 17 breeding species are recorded.

Bat rescue is arduous work. “The phone can start any time after 7am and I can be up to 2am,” says Sally, who hasn’t had a holiday for four years. She lovingly attends rescues with her dog, Little Skipper.

Many bats are successfully returned to the wild but some can’t and several of these form part of her ‘educational bat’ collection for school and club awareness visits.

They reside in a series of aviaries in the bat-cave (her back bedroom). As we enter she pauses to pluck something from the carpet: “Meal worms get everywhere,” she says, cheerfully.

She introduces me to Jethro the Noctule bat. Noctules are Britain’s biggest bat species but when Jethro arrived he was positively lardy. “He weighed 46 grammes and was too fat to fly.”

Born in captivity, Jethro was living in a bathroom where he was clinging to an old beer towel on top of the shower rail. “His rescuers were trying to care for him but they were overfeeding him,” says Sally. “He could barely claw his way along.”

Six months of expert care have seen him drop to a svelte 25 grammes and given hope he can be released.

As Sally gloves up and gently extracts him from his roost he squeaks and bares his tiny teeth but seems delighted to be placed on her chest where he clings like a Gothic corsage, gently quivering as she moves about. “They do that to warm up,” she says.

Only his mum would call him beautiful but there is something endearing about his silky fur, bright eyes, and the way those wings are folded carefully underneath. They have been strengthened by a delightful physiotherapy; crawling up Sally’s carpeted stairs, and she offers to give me a demo. I settle at the top, expecting a long wait. But Jethro zooms up like Usain Bolt and then starts haring towards me. Anxious not to scare him, I lock myself in the bathroom.

Sally laughs; she’s used to reactions like mine but the cruelty that’s sometimes shown towards these inoffensive little mammals makes her weep.

She wants us to keep our cats in at dusk during the summer (that’s the time most bats are at risk), check for roosting bats when we have building work done, call her if we find a distressed bat and give her group some money to help them in their work.

In return, every bat that visits your garden will consume nearly 3,000 irritating gnats and mosquitoes every night!

It’s a far cry from the popular movie image of a blood-sucking monster, which does pain her so. “Bram Stoker has a lot to answer for,” says Sally, grimly. Looking at the innocent Jethro, I can’t help agree.

East Dorset Bat Rescue and Rehabilitation 07746 743221