I save a few of these moths from an early death at the hands of various foes – cats, running bath taps, spider’s webs. ‘Good moth!’ I told one not long ago. I praise moths so they distinguish good behaviour, such as leaving the house through open windows, from bad, such as flying at lamps. But in many cases my efforts will be futile: over the course of the summer many moths will be eaten by bats. Moths are a favourite snack for bats, along with cockchafers, dung beetles and gnats. A pipistrelle bat – the most common breed in Britain – will eat around 3,000 gnats in one night. I know stuff like this because last summer I went on three guided bat walks in the space of three months in the fifty square miles surrounding my house. Most of these revolved around lesser and greater horseshoe bats, species once common in the south-west of Britain, whose numbers dropped dramatically through the twentieth century but have risen again in recent years. Seventy per cent of Britain’s current population of around 10,000 horseshoe bats can be found in Devon. They like the mild climate here, and the hedgerows, which as Anna, a member of Devon Wildlife Trust’s Greater Horseshoe Bat Project, told me, ‘make for excellent bat commuter tunnels’.
If you visit the footpath leading down to Buckfastleigh town centre from the ruined church at the top of the hill at dusk on a rainless summer night, you’ll see precisely what Anna means. It’s like a bat motorway: dozens of horseshoes speeding up the leafy corridor towards Dartmoor, weaving expertly between branches and your face, like X-wing Starfighters negotiating the artificial canyons of the fragmenting Death Star. I luckily managed to photograph a couple of these bats on my second visit to the spot. In the background of one shot is a ghostly figure that I would like to boast is one of Devon’s infamous Green Lane sprites but was actually another bat spotter, further down the hill. Bat spotting is a common hobby here. Earlier in the year, Chris, who co-runs the community radio station where I volunteer as a DJ, had been walking in the area at nightfall and saw a gang of tough-looking adolescents approaching who appeared to be up to no good. Their threatening aura dissipated when he noticed that all of them clutched bat detectors in their hands.
A top-of-the-range bat detector will set you back well over a hundred quid but, on a tip-off from Bea, another Devon Wildlife Trust volunteer, who hosted a bat walk in the village of Dartington earlier this month, I discovered that Argos do a surprisingly good children’s version for around a tenner. Sadly, when I went into Argos in Exeter and typed ‘bat detector’ into one of their terminals, the item turned out to be out of stock. The woman behind me in the queue saw and offered a look of sympathy, perhaps less in recognition of my disappointment and more because I was the kind of person who goes into Argos and types ‘bat detector’ into one of their terminals.
In June, at Berry Head Nature Reserve, I sat with twenty other bat enthusiasts with more advanced bat detectors and waited for the local horseshoe population to emerge from their roost in the old quarry overlooking the sea. The age of my fellow enthusiasts ranged from early twenties to late sixties, and no archetypal bat enthusiast attire was in evidence, although I could not help noticing one younger couple who looked about as much like bats as any two Homo sapiens I had ever seen. Their style was something that stepped boldly and spikily beyond goth: an all-black mix of tough fabric, elaborate piercings and violently angular hard-glued hair that suggested a life lived in darkness, on the wing and on the edge. Sadly the batlike couple appeared to have a muttering disagreement part-way through the evening, and made a low-key but semi-dramatic exit towards the car park so did not get a chance to witness any actual bats. All we’d really done as a group by that point was root through some cowpats for dung beetles, which I found fascinating but am aware might not be everyone’s idea of a quality Friday night.
The pipistrelles came out first at Berry Head, common bats you’ll see in most rural areas of the UK in summer, only around a quarter of the size of a greater horseshoe. We were instructed to change the range on our detectors ten minutes later, when the greater horseshoes emerged, since they echo-located at a higher frequency to the pipistrelles: around 80 kHz. Several bat experts had told me that the noise horseshoes made was like nothing else on earth. Bea described it as ‘like a long wet fart’. To me it sounded like the highfalutin work of a rural acid house DJ who lived by his own rules. It mixed with the music drifting across on the wind from a nightspot in the nearby town of Brixham to create a mash-up that many would have agreed managed to be simultaneously rinsing and banging. Three teenage
