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
00:33bat workers and conservationists, they're now a bit of a conservation success story, and we have about
00:3715,000 individuals in the UK. This data that we collect, it provides these trends over time where
00:44we can see how the species are doing, not just on an individual roost level, but also across the UK.
00:50Yeah, absolutely, and it can sort of help to raise the alarm early if there is a downward trend for
00:55any reason. We can sort of look at, well, why is that happening? Otherwise, we can risk
00:58losing a species. We manage around 10 different sites of all this species, and we actually hold
01:05about 50% of the population, which is quite a big responsibility. So we visit regularly to
01:10make sure everything's going well, to count the bats and to do site maintenance.
01:23This is where the mum bats are giving birth and rearing their pups. They have just one pup per year,
01:30and they return to the same roost annually.
01:35So you'll see the large clusters of the young all together to maintain the body heat, but then
01:39there'll be a couple of adults left in there, keeping an eye whilst all the other mothers are out,
01:43and then they'll get a chance to go out and feed when the others come back.
01:46It's such a lovely system. It's almost human-like.
01:52It's amazing when you think about how hard it is for us to see in this light, and yet these
01:56bats can reach
01:57up 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, it's kind of hard to
02:09explain what they sound like, but then you get that little wobbly, wobbly, whistling call.
02:15And what they're doing there is they're emitting a really high ultrasonic call and listening to the echoes, aren't they?
02:20Yes, they are. They have a nose leaf through which they echolocate, as opposed to most of our bats
02:25which echolocate 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 a
02:33real 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 roofs such as this, we wouldn't know
02:52how 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 hangs around for years to
03:00come.
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