Bolton Crofts - Bat Activity -

Dear friends

As the warmer days of May arrive the bats are fully out of hibernation and gather over our fields to forage for food in the darkness of night. It is this time of year that the female bats are consuming food both for themselves and the young, they will soon be giving birth to at their maternity roosts.

Bolton Crofts is no exception for this nocturnal activity to take place. As well as a key foraging ground for both the Common Pipistrelle and the Soprano Pipistrelle bats that roost in the old buildings of the town of Richmond, the longstanding hedge lines which run across these wildflower meadows act as flightpaths for bats enabling them to forage further away from their roosts. Without these flightpaths, the bats become trapped from ranging further away in search of food.

In my previous posts on Bolton Crofts here in the market town of Richmond, North Yorkshire, I have made you aware that a local landowner submitted a planning application to build 27 houses over the top of this ancient wildflower meadow destroying a key ecological area that provides significant habitat to the wildlife and birds of our town.

Bolton Crofts is one of the remaining wildflower meadows that once surrounded the whole town. With Bolton Crofts meadow under threat from the developers who have claimed in their Ecological Impact Assessment that building houses on this field would have “No impacts on bats”, the truth is a little different from the developer's claim.

Over several mornings I recorded the bat activity taking place across the field using a bat detector. I presented my findings in a letter to the planning officer in charge of the planning application.

I’m sharing my letter here with you to read. The letter is in the public domain and can be found on the North Yorkshire Council planning website so there are no confidentiality concerns with sharing it here.

In a time when conservation and biodiversity have become buzzwords in the lexicon of the green agender, saving the remaining green spaces around our towns and cities from development is an uphill battle even when those green spaces are already in a designated conservation area just like the conservation area that Bolton Crofts is located inside of.

By raising awareness of the bat activity over Bolton Crofts I live in hope that future generations also get to experience the wonder of the acrobatic displays of the many bats I observed in the early morning twilight of these May mornings leaving in awe. It is this awe that has ignited a desire to give these small flying mammals a voice in saving their home at Bolton Crofts.

With hope.

Stephen

My letter

Dear Fiona Hunter

If I may I would like to bring to your attention some additional information that I have been able to collate about bat activity in the meadow at Bolton Crofts that I was unable to include in my previous letter due to the bats being in hibernation.

This past week I have carried out dawn monitoring of the site over several mornings as well as one dusk monitoring session where I recorded Bat activity to provide evidence that the field of the proposed planning application for full planning permission for the residential development of 27 dwellings and associated infrastructure will negatively impact the local Bat population which use this field as a key foraging area and flight path.

In this letter, I have provided several Google Earth images highlighting the Bat activity I have recorded at Bolton Crofts Meadow. I appreciate that these images could have been edited to provide misleading information regarding the number of Bat activities recorded, I will therefore be more than happy upon request to provide the raw data of the full sessions. In this raw data, each file is time and date-stamped and can be used to cross-reference with the accompanying Google Earth .klm file. The Bat recorder that was used to gather this information is the Echo Meter Touch 2 Pro from Wildlife Acoustics. The classifiers used in the Echo Meter Touch are taken directly from the professional bat analysis software Kaleidoscope Pro.

I am more than aware that Bat activity recording of this nature as stated in the Bat Conservation Trust publication titled “Bat Surveys for Professional Ecologists – Good Practice Guidelines”, in chapter 8 of “Bat Activity Surveys” section 8.2.13 quotes; “A limitation of data from automated/static systems is that there is no observational context. One hundred bat passes could represent one bat passing 100 times or 100 bats each passing once. Reality is likely to be somewhere between these two extremes,”

I have personally experienced more bats than I have seen in many years flying all around me whilst documenting these accompanying images which again is only my word, but the images below confirm that a need for a Bat survey is now a requirement to be carried out before any consideration of planning permission can be granted.

Analysing the information that I have gathered, the species of Bat most recorded was the Common Pipistrelle Bat. In the UK Biodiversity Action Plan, it is this Bat the Common Pipistrelle that is one of the priority species listed. The Richmondshire Biodiversity Action Plan highlights the threats these Bats are facing here in Richmondshire from “Habitat removal and fragmentation of the landscape leading to disruption of commuting routes.” These are the same threats our local Common Pipistrelle Bats face at Bolton Crofts if planning permission is granted in the field of the proposed planning application. In the local Biodiversity Action Plans Richmondshire Community Strategy has five themed aims, one of which is "To protect our plants and animals (biodiversity)" and one of the aims is to "identify locally important habitats and species;"