Championing bats across Teesside and the Cleveland area
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.
A single stretch of Cleveland woodland has been walked, listened to and scribbled about by volunteers for the best part of a century. We dug into the notebooks to find out what a changing landscape has done to its bats — and why your local transect might matter more than any national survey.
From the A19 to the A66, our biggest road schemes come with bat-friendly engineering attached — but are the bats reading the plans? We look at what the mitigation was meant to do, and what the animals are actually doing instead.
Our villages are glowing brighter than ever thanks to the great LED switchover — but for bats, all that white light is a wall across the night sky. Here's why it matters, and what you can do about it on your own parish council.
Thanks to DNA analysis of bat droppings, researchers can now read a bat's dinner menu in extraordinary detail. We look at what Cleveland's pipistrelles are really eating on a summer night — and what it tells us about the state of our insect populations.
Beneath the thunder of the A19 and the rumble of the railway, bats have quietly moved into some of Teesside's least glamorous real estate. We talk to the ecologists who monitor our bridge-dwelling colonies — and explain why a lump of 1970s concrete might be the best roost in Cleveland.
Found a planning application that could flatten a roost you know about? Before you fire off an angry email, learn how the planning system actually works. This is a practical walkthrough of reading ecology reports, spotting weak survey evidence, and writing an objection that planners are legally obliged to take seriously.
Follow three soprano pipistrelles from cold, collapsed and grounded to full aerial fitness, all thanks to a handful of trained volunteers in Guisborough. Along the way, we unpick what you can legally do when you find a bat in trouble — and what absolutely must be left to the experts.
From vampire legends to fears about disease, the same old bat myths keep surfacing at every fete and school visit we run. Here are the six we hear most often — and the friendly, practical comebacks our volunteers use to win people over.
Disused railway tunnels, brick bridges and forgotten culverts have quietly become some of Teesside's most important bat habitat. We explore the industrial relics our bats now call home — and argue it's time conservationists celebrated our built landscape rather than apologising for it.