The Notebooks That Could Save a Roost: Why Teesside Needs Its Bat Records in One Place

Ask around at any Teesside naturalists' gathering and you'll hear the same story told a dozen different ways. A retired teacher in Marske who's kept bat notes since 1987. A helpline volunteer with a spreadsheet of every call-out since 2015. A farmer near Stokesley who knows exactly which field edge the pipistrelles work at dusk, because his father told him. Put all of that together and you'd have a genuinely remarkable picture of bats in Cleveland. Keep it scattered, and you have nothing.

That, in a nutshell, is our argument for a proper local biological records effort for bats — and why we think it can't wait much longer.

What We're Actually Sitting On

Cleveland Bats gets calls all year round. A bat found on a curtain in Redcar. A loft exclusion proposed in Yarm. A roost spotted during a loft conversion in Saltburn. Each of those interactions generates data: species, location, date, sometimes numbers. Multiply that by our dusk walks, our surveys, our members' personal notebooks, and you've got the makings of a serious dataset.

The trouble is that most of it exists in formats that would make a data manager weep. Handwritten tally sheets. Voice notes on phones. Memory — which, let's be honest, is where a worrying amount of natural history knowledge currently lives.

And memory doesn't survive. People move, downsize, or pass on, and with them goes the only record that a particular gable end in Guisborough has hosted soprano pipistrelles every summer since the millennium. The planning application still goes in. The ecologist's single dusk survey in June might catch it, might not. The roost knowledge evaporates.

The Systems That Exist — and Where They Fall Short

Now, we should be fair. The infrastructure partly exists. The national Bat Record database, coordinated through the Bat Conservation Trust, collects bat records from across Britain. Regional environmental records centres — there's one covering our corner of the North East — exist to hold biological data and supply it to planners and developers.

So why aren't we cheering? Two reasons.

First, the flow of data from amateur recorders into these systems is patchy at best. The national schemes do brilliant work, but a volunteer with a bat detector on a Tuesday evening in Loftus doesn't always know where to send their findings, or assumes their handful of records won't matter. They do matter. Local records centres often hold only a thin scattering of bat data for our area, which makes it very hard to argue a case at planning committee when the evidence base looks empty.

Second, and this is the bit that frustrates us: the systems aren't built with the amateur in mind. Submission portals can be clunky. Feedback is rare — you send in a record and rarely hear whether it was verified, let alone used. For a volunteer community already stretched thin, that's a poor incentive to keep contributing.

What Good Would It Actually Do?

It's worth being concrete, because "better data" sounds abstract until you see it in action.

A planning officer reviewing an application for a barn conversion can check the local records centre. If it shows twenty years of brown long-eared records from that parish — from real, verified observations by local people — the case for a proper ecological assessment gets much stronger. Data doesn't stop development; it shapes it. Timing restrictions, lighting conditions, retention of access points. These are won with evidence, not sentiment.

Beyond planning, a well-populated dataset tells us things we genuinely don't know. Which winter hibernation sites are being used year on year? Are our common pipistrelle numbers holding steady while soprano numbers climb? Where are the gaps — the parishes nobody surveys? Right now, we can't answer those questions with confidence, and that should bother anyone who cares about the wildlife on their doorstep.

A Modest Proposal

We're not calling for a new quango. We're calling for three things.

One: a straightforward, well-publicised route for Teesside's bat recorders to submit sightings — paper, email, or online, whatever gets the record in. Two: a local effort, working with the regional records centre and BCT, to digitise the back catalogues gathering dust in members' lofts and sheds. Three: feedback. Tell recorders when their data gets used. Show them the planning decision it informed. People give more when they can see it matters.

We'd happily start with our own records — every helpline call-out and dusk walk tally we hold, cleaned up and submitted. But we'd love yours too. That notebook from the 1990s. The spreadsheet your dad kept. The species you're fairly sure you saw at Kirkleatham one August evening.

Bats are quiet animals. Their records shouldn't be.