Championing bats across Teesside and the Cleveland area
We plan our biggest events for weekends, then wonder why people come away underwhelmed. Here's the case for scrapping the crowds and taking up a quiet midweek patrol on the paths right outside your door.
Three Cleveland churches, three colonies of pipistrelles, and three very different attitudes to sharing a Grade II listed roof with the neighbourhood's most reliable evening congregation. We visited the vicars and volunteers who've stopped fighting and started adapting — and found that some of the solutions are wonderfully low-tech.
We left a static bat detector running in a modest Marton back garden for a whole month, then sat down with the sound files to work out what all that squeaking means. The results say a lot about which bats share our gardens — and when they need us to keep quiet.
Somewhere between a Victorian parish register and a Saturday morning scramble through a Guisborough wood, Cleveland's bat atlas is taking shape. We joined the volunteers plotting every known roost between the Tees and the North York Moors — and found out why the blanks on the map matter as much as the pins.
Forget the usual weekend itinerary — Cleveland's best nightlife starts about twenty minutes after sunset. Here's where to park, where to eat beforehand, and exactly what to chuck in the rucksack for your first bat-watching break on Teesside.
We caught the last ferry over the Tees as the sun dipped behind the steelworks, then spent a long midsummer night counting Daubenton's bats over the reedbeds. Here's what one of Britain's most industrial rivers taught us about wildness surviving in the most unlikely places.
Ever wondered why one bat walk is alive with pipistrelles and the next is dead as a doornail? Weather is the answer. Here's how to read the forecast like a bat and pick your evenings wisely across Cleveland.
Every bat worker on Teesside has stared at a detector screen wondering: soprano or common? Here are the field marks — sonic and otherwise — that separate our two commonest pipistrelles, and the honest art of writing 'Pipistrellus sp.' when the evidence won't play ball.
Alum works, ironstone mines and crumbling kilns weren't built for wildlife — but they've become some of the best hibernation sites in the region. We argue that saving Cleveland's industrial heritage and saving its bats are, quite literally, the same fight.
Just when you thought bat season was winding down, September throws the wildest gathering of the year. Swarming is where Cleveland's bats mate, mingle and map out their winter quarters — and you can help count them.
A crumbling mill on the River Leven has quietly become one of the best roosts in the Cleveland area. Now restoration plans could save the building — and lose the bats. Here's why we think there's a middle way.
A routine survey, a loft full of droppings, and a sale that suddenly feels like it's hanging by a thread — or a wing. We follow one fictionalised Saltburn house sale through the whole bat roost process, and separate the panic from the paperwork.
Somewhere in a Guisborough shed there's a notebook with a brown long-eared roost written in biro, and it's doing nobody any good there. We think it's time Cleveland's scattered bat knowledge — detector logs, helpline call-outs, dusk walk tallies — was pulled together into a proper local records system, before it's too late.
A roost box that nobody moves into is just garden clutter. We spent a season with the volunteer carpenters testing box designs across Cleveland's woods and back gardens to find out what actually gets occupied — and what gets ignored.
Everyone says conservation has a grey-hair problem, but what does it actually take for someone in their twenties to get licensed, trusted and up a ladder in Stockton before breakfast? We spent a full survey season following Megan to find out — and the answer is messier, and more hopeful, than the training brochures suggest.
Ever fancied running your own community bat walk but worried you'll spend the evening shepherding lost toddlers rather than spotting pipistrelles? Our seasoned walk leaders share the practical — and occasionally farcical — realities of organising a public dusk event around Teesside.
Look around at any Cleveland Bats meeting and you'll spot the problem before you hear it: we're getting older, and the average age of our volunteers is climbing faster than a pipistrelle up a soffit box. Here's an honest look at why young people aren't joining bat groups — and what we're doing about it.
Most farmers are told bats are a paperwork headache. One Cleveland livestock farmer has spent a decade treating his barns as shared accommodation — and his business is better for it. We paid him a visit to find out how it actually works.
Every call to our helpline is logged, and a year's worth of those logs tells a fascinating story about how Clevelanders really feel about bats. From July's grounded pups to midwinter lounge visitors, here's what the phone reveals.
Victorian engineers blasted through the Cleveland Hills to keep the iron roads running. A century and a half later, those same tunnels have found a second career: hibernation hotels for Natterer's and brown long-eared bats. We follow our volunteers through the cold and the dark to see who's sleeping.