Grey Hair and Bat Detectors: Who's Going to Carry the Torch After Us?

Let's start with an uncomfortable confession. At last month's Cleveland Bats committee meeting, the combined age in the room was somewhere north of four hundred years. We laughed about it. Then we stopped laughing, because the joke only works while there's still a committee to laugh in.

If you've ever come along to one of our dusk walks — and we hope you have — you'll have noticed the same thing we have. The detector-wielders skew grey. The people who know which culvert holds the Natterer's are mostly retired. The under-thirties? Often there are none at all.

The Numbers Don't Lie

We did a rough head count across our active membership recently. Fewer than one in ten of us is under thirty-five. Meanwhile, the naturalists who mapped Teesside's bat populations through the eighties and nineties are, quite naturally, stepping back from the ladders and the late nights.

This isn't unique to us, of course. Talk to mammal groups from Northumberland down to Kent and you'll hear the same story. British Trust for Ornithology surveys have flagged the ageing volunteer base for years, and mammal recording has it even tougher than birds. Birding has RSPB membership, Springwatch, a whole cultural pipeline. Bats have... well, us, and a detector that costs more than a decent bicycle.

But knowing it's a national problem doesn't fill next year's rota for the hibernation checks.

It's Not That Young People Don't Care

Here's the good news: the passion is there. Genuinely, it is. Our rescue line gets more calls from younger people than anyone. The issue isn't interest — it's access, and it's how we've historically run things.

Think about how most bat groups operate. Evening meetings in church halls. Surveys that finish at midnight, forty minutes' drive from anywhere. Equipment that costs hundreds of pounds. A culture where the person who's been doing it since 1987 knows everything and the newcomer knows nothing, and everyone knows it.

None of that is welcoming if you're twenty-three, don't drive, work shifts, and learned to love wildlife through a phone screen.

What We're Actually Doing About It

Talk is cheap, so here's our plan — and we'd love you to hold us to it.

Mentoring, properly done. We're pairing every new under-thirty volunteer with an experienced member for a full season. Not a one-off walk — a proper apprenticeship. You learn survey technique, roost identification, the paperwork. The mentor learns what actually gets young people through the door.

University partnerships. We're building links with students at Teesside University and Durham, offering dissertation projects with real data behind them. A student gets a project and a reference; we get fresh eyes on our records. Everybody wins.

Kit we can lend out. We're expanding our detector loan scheme so nobody needs to spend £300 before they know whether they're hooked. If you're curious, borrow first.

Meeting people where they are. Yes, that means social media — proper posts, not a committee member's nephew occasionally uploading a blurry photo. And it means running some events that start earlier and finish earlier, because not everyone can be out at 11pm on a Tuesday.

Learning From Others

We're not pretending to have invented any of this. Groups like the Mammal Society have been pushing youth engagement for years, and some county recorder networks have seen real success with structured young volunteer schemes. Wildlife trusts across the country run naturalist training programmes — the 'new naturalists' model — that take complete beginners to competent surveyors in eighteen months. There's no reason a bat group can't do the same.

An Invitation, Not a Guilt Trip

Here's the thing. We're not writing this to make our long-serving members feel bad — they've given decades to Cleveland's bats, and the records they've built are priceless. We're writing this because we want the next forty years of bat conservation on Teesside to be as strong as the last ten.

If you're under thirty and you've ever stopped to watch something small and fast flicker over the Tees at dusk, we'd genuinely like to meet you. No experience needed. No detector required. Just turn up to one of our summer walks and see if it grabs you.

The bats will still be here. The question is whether we will — all of us, of every age — to keep watching over them.