I’m quite high up.
I didn’t realise I was this high up.
Oh, wow.
I’m Yussef Rafik, and I’m a zoologist and former zookeeper.
I’ve spent years working with animals, so I know how tough but also rewarding
it can be.
But now I want to try some of the more unusual wildlife jobs out there
and meet the dedicated people behind them to find out if I have
what it takes.
Meet Morgan
I’m on my way to meet a bat expert who spends most nights
monitoring urban bat populations out here in the UK, and I’m going to be
spending 24 hours with her and her team as they go about on their mission
to protect this often misunderstood creature.
Hi Morgan,
Hi Yussef, nice to meet you. Come on in.
Lovely to meet you too, thank you, I’m excited for this.
Yeah, me too.
[Yussef] Morgan is an ecologist who dedicates up to five nights a week
to monitoring local bat populations, along with the help of volunteers.
Bats are among
the UK’s most threatened animals, with some being critically endangered.
Along with Morgan and her team.
I’m heading to an urban
woodland just outside of Birmingham in the hopes of seeing some bats up close
and collecting some data that will help their conservation.
Checking the Bat Boxes
First up is checking the bat boxes.
Right.
So we’ve arrived at one of the bat boxes.
What is it that we have to do now?
Well, we need to find out if there’s anything in there.
Some of the bat boxes are open, and we can check with a torch.
But this one is going to have to climb up and check it with a ladder.
So you climb the ladder.
Check the box, if there’s any bats inside, put the lid straight back on the box,
and we’re going to put a little stuffy
bag in there and then bring them down and see what we’ve got.
Brilliant, let’s get a ladder.
It’s a bit wobbly,
It’s a bit wobbly,
but apparently it’s supposed to be wobbly.
[Morgan] Perfect.
Oh, you got a bat!
[Yussef] There’s a bat in there. Oh, wow. Okay.
Carefully put that back on.
[Morgan] You need to put one of the little bags in the hole.
[Yussef] Okay, got a bag in my pocket.
So this is just going to block the hole.
So they can’t fly out.
You got the box?
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
[Yussef] We got a bat.
[Morgan] Good job.
[Yussef] Yeah.
Let’s see what we got.
Right.
Sampling the Bat
[Yussef] Is that the bats we can hear?
[Morgan] Yeah.
So you can, you can hear him?
Yeah.
[Morgan] So the first thing that we’re going to do is a swabbing.
So you need to get that inside the mouth.
Yeah.
And this is noctule bat?
This is a noctule bat.
It’s our biggest species in the UK.
[Yussef] Noctule bats call at a lower frequency that can be heard by some humans.
We still have a lot to learn about this species, which is why
the next part of Morgan’s research is so important.
[Morgan] One. Two,
three, four five six,
[Yussef] Look at those teeth!
[Morgan] Seven, eight, nine, ten.
We are sampling for volatile chemicals.
As well as being really good communicators with sound
bats are also really good communicators with smell.
But not much work has been done
looking at the composition of the chemicals they use for signaling.
And these big glands, they can be quite stinky
and they have a lot of chemicals and they they’ve been observed
to actually rub them on roost entrances.
And they have a quite a unique mating style.
These bats will have a harem.
And so chemical signaling is really important
to the males in attracting females, maybe even deterring other males.
We really don’t know much about it.
So let me just pinch him from you Scott.
Urban Bats
[Yussef] Bat numbers in the UK crashed over the last century
and although some species have started to recover,
they’re still threatened by things
like habitat loss, climate change and falling insect numbers.
So I’m really interested in finding out
how bats are doing in busy urban areas like this one.
So in terms of the bat populations, the urban bats that we have here,
are they healthier than the other bats that you get?
[Morgan] Actually, really interesting.
What you’ll see in a minute is that Tasha and Beck are going to be weighing
and measuring the bat.
And over the last 6 years of doing this, we’ve taken our dataset
and compared it to a similar dataset, same part of the world,
Herefordshire, just just not too far away, but mostly, mostly rural.
Okay.
And we found that in all, in the five species that we looked at,
four of them were bigger in urban environments,
and that seems to kind of go against it.
You think maybe it’s not such good habitat.
And we think there might be quite a few things at play. One
in urban
areas is not the widespread agricultural use of pesticides.
[Yussef] Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Morgan] The other thing is the urban heat island effect, which means that they can
maybe come out of hibernation earlier,
it’s time for them to have babies.
[Yussef] So there’s actually potentially a few benefits of living in an urban area.
[Morgan] Yeah from that point of view, this is a greater heterogeneity of habitat,
so it’s more like a mosaic rather
than all being the same crop.
[Yussef] Okay, which is good for them.
[Morgan] So, a wider range of insects to feed on.
Very true.
[Yussef] Now that we’ve collected the data we need it’s my job to return the box
back to its tree, ready for another bat.
Interview with Morgan
I’m so happy that we found that noctule bat.
I’ve never seen a bat up close like that before.
Oh, quite high up.
I didn’t realise I was this high up.
Now we have to wait until nightfall so that we can come back,
set up a few traps and do something called a net survey.
But before that, I wanted to ask Morgan a few questions about her work.
Oh, here we are.
Marion’s Wood.
Now, Morgan, what I really want to know is why do you love bats so much?
Big question.
Yeah, it is a huge question because,
you know, I do bats all day every day pretty much and all night.
I think to an extent, it’s because I feel that they are
kind of unsung species that people
are they often vilify because of the media
and maybe even sort of, you know, cultural mythology.
They associated with things that are creepy and they
they are desperately in need of our conservation efforts.
40% of bat species are of conservation concern, so are endangered, vulnerable,
near threatened, etc. They’re an understudied group.
They play vital roles in the ecosystem and they are in trouble.
And with climate change, they’re going to be more in trouble.
And so anything that we can learn about them is important.
And the type of surveys that we’re doing today, sort of trapping about box checks,
that just gives us information about, you know, what
sex the bats are, how old they are, are they breeding here?
How would you like
the public’s perception of bats the change in the future?
For the better.
Obviously I would like to see bats
vilified less and championed more.
I think that we don’t we don’t protect what we don’t value
and we don’t value what we don’t know about.
And that’s where it starts. Education
No, I fully agree. Bats are awesome.
Bat trapping
[Yussef] With night falling quickly, it’s time to start our next round of surveys.
Morgan wants to find out which bats are hunting in the woods at night,
and bat traps are one of the best ways of doing that.
The first type of trap we’re setting up is called a mist trap,
formed a multiple nylon strings in which the bat is tangled.
Whilst we wait and see whether anything flies into the first trap,
I go with Morgan to set up a harp trap nearby, which works by catching
bats as they fly into his strings and tumble into the bag below
We’ve just set up the traps and now we’re going to head back to base camp.
And it’s basically just a waiting game now until we get the call the first bat.
So wish us luck.
[Morgan] So we lower it down, so the bat is kind of an elbow height.
Okay.
It’s a girl.
[Yussef] And it is not an echolocation call.
[Morgan] This is a…
Don’t touch me!
[Yussef] It really is like Christmas.
Once we catch our first noctule, all the other species begin
appearing thick and fast.
So this is a brown long eared bat.
[Morgan] It is a brown long eared bat.
[Yussef] You can definitely tell.
That’s that’s one I can ID.
Look at those ears.
Oh, wow.
As opposed to the noctule, the brown long earred bat is known
as the whispering bat because it’s call is so quiet.
This little bat’s huge ears make it an expert
at hunting woodland insects through echolocation.
It is weighed, examined,
measured, and then is ready for release.
[Yussef] Wow.
[Morgan] There you go!
So we’ve just finished collecting up all the data on the bats,
and I’ve honestly had an amazing day today.
I absolutely loved it.
I’ve learned more about bats than I ever thought I would.
And it’s just incredible
to think that while all this is happening, all this research is going on.
The rest of the city is just asleep, asleep in their beds.
I feel like I’ve had a real glimpse into a secret world.
