00:07Greater horseshoe bats are wonderfully weird, my favourite kind of animal. They've got this big
00:13horseshoe-shaped nose leaf, which is where they get their name from, and they use that to emit
00:17ultrasonic calls. They have a wingspan about 30 centimetres, they're pretty big. They're once
00:23widespread but due to factors such as habitat loss and roots disruption, there are only a couple of
00:28thousands of individuals left. But due to some really hard work by lots of different bat workers
00:33and conservationists, they're now a bit of a conservation success story, and we have about 15,000 individuals in the
00:39UK.
00:41This data that we collect, it provides these trends over time where we can see how the species are
00:46doing, not just on an individual roost level, but also across the UK. Yeah, absolutely, and it can
00:51sort of help to raise the alarm early if there is a downward trend for any reason. We can sort
00:56of look
00:56well why is that happening, otherwise we can risk losing a species. We manage around 10 different
01:02sites of all this species, and we actually hold about 50% of the population, which is quite a big
01:08responsibility. So we visit regularly to make sure everything's going well, to count the bats and to do
01:13site maintenance. Let's see if they're inside. This is where the mum bats are giving birth and rearing
01:27their pups. They have just one pup per year and they return to the same roost annually.
01:34So you'll see the large clusters of the young all together to maintain the body heat, but then there'll be
01:39a couple of adults left in there keeping an eye whilst all the other mothers are out and then
01:43they'll get a chance to go out and feed when the others come back. It's such a lovely system,
01:47it's almost human-like.
01:52It's amazing when you think about how hard it is for us to see in this light,
01:55and yet these bats can reach up to speeds of about 30 miles an hour and catch prey.
02:04When you introduce someone that may not have heard a horseshoe bat before,
02:08it's kind of hard to explain what they sound like, but then you get a wobbly, wobbly, whistling call.
02:15And what they're doing there is they're emitting a really high ultrasonic call
02:19and listening to the echoes, aren't they?
02:21Yes, they are. They have a nose leaf through which they echolocate, as opposed to most of our bats which
02:25echolocate through their mouth. And they use the difference between making the call and the echo
02:30returning to figure out how close they are to something. So that allows them to kind of get
02:33a real picture of where they are, what's around them, in really low light conditions.
02:39Lots of people think that bats are blind, but they can see quite well, but that echolocation,
02:44that just gives them that extra edge that they need.
02:47Without this sort of citizen science project of monitoring roost such as this,
02:51we wouldn't know how they were doing and it's been a real success story.
02:55And together we can all do our bit to make sure the greater horseshoe bat
02:59hangs around for years to come.
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