NBMP Hibernation Surveys, February 2025
Text by Tina Wiffen.
Photographs by Lauren Gibson and Adam Raitr.
This was our second survey of the winter, a few of us had been out in December to check the sites over and see what we could find. In December we found six bats, a low count as we had checked ten sites. We planned to go again in January, but as so often happens for these surveys, the snow gods intervened and we didn’t get a January count done.
In February, ten of us set out to see what we could find, we split into two teams and managed to cover all ten sites.
We found 13 bats! This was a really high count; it exceeded my expectations. It just shows that you can’t trust bats. This was our third highest February count, with 18 bats in 2019 and 17 in 2020. We have been surveying these sites since 2014.
We found five Daubenton’s bats Myotis daubentonii, five Natterer’s bats M. nattereri and three brown long-eared bats Plecotus auritus. Three of the Natterer’s bats were in a single site, and the others were in different adits, all sites where we have found Natterer’s bats before. This species used to be our most recorded bat species, but they have been found much less frequent recently.
We also found three bats in the adit under the road, this is the highest count for this site; one bat was hard to identify, only a foot and part of the wing could be seen.
The top site only held two bats, both Daubenton’s bat, this adit is often used by brown long-eared bats although we did not see any during this survey. Unusually for this site both bats were tucked into the arching, with none found in the deeper shale cut section. Are they moving closer to the portal as the weather has been mild?
There were lots of fresh otter Lutra lutra tracks within the adits, I don’t think that will affect the bat use of the sites, but it just shows how valuable these sites are to many different species. The bat counts were high, but the moth counts were low, we only recorded six tissue Triphosa dubitata and 116 herald Scoliopteryx libatrix across ten sites.
Thanks to everyone who came, I really appreciated your help, hopefully you all enjoyed it as much as I did. 🙂
And just in case you are wondering – NBMP stands for National Bat Monitoring Programme. More information can be found here.
