Ecology and Conservation of Bats in Villages and Towns

"This was published by the German agency for nature conservation in 2004. Central Germany is very special because there’s a university with a lot of bat interest in an area with lots of bats, and they have sent many PhD students out looking at them. Over about ten years, it’s built up into a tremendously detailed study which is what you need. As you delve into their lives you see how complex they are. This tries to unravel the complexities of their lives. Well, the fact that the roosts keep moving around the countryside. That’s what they are beginning to work out. Partly through sound and partly through scent. It’s very difficult to know how they communicate which roosting place they’re going to return to after a night of foraging. They do audibly chatter in the daytime but when they emerge at dusk they split up and disperse over a large area. Then, when they come back, they’ve all already decided which roost they’re coming back to. It’s quite a mystery how they decide this. The chatter could be communication and the scent too. Most mammals can communicate by scent over a long distance. Horses can smell over 30 miles. We don’t smell very far so we often ignore this important sense. It could be that bats put scent markers down. This book gives a very good insight into how populations are changing, how bats are moving around the countryside, how they use foraging areas. They did detailed studies over a long period of time using radio-tracking and roost-counting. This is the sort of thing we should be doing in the UK."