· Bats are Mammals—they are warm blooded, give birth, and suckle their young.

 

· Bats are the only true flying mammals.

 

· Bats are very social animals, they live in groups, groom each other, and have a wide range of social communication sounds that (as yet) have not been interpreted.

 

· Bats are long-lived (some up to 20 years), highly intelligent, and more agile in flight than most birds.

 

· Female bats can only have one baby a year, so it takes many years for a colony to recover from ay sort of “disaster”.

 

· There are over 1,000 species of bats worldwide, in two families  :- Mega-bats which are mainly fruit bats and flying foxes, and Micro-bats which are generally smaller and mainly eat insects.

 

· There are 16 species of bats in the UK, all are micro-bats, and all eat insects.

 

· The smallest UK bat is the Pipistrelle weighing about 5g, and the largest is the Noctule weighing about 49g.

 

· All UK bats hibernate in the winter when there are not enough insects for them to eat.

 

· In summer females gather together in “maternity roosts” to give birth and raise their babies.

 

· Maternity roosts are sometimes in houses (for the warmth), but hibernation roosts are in dark, cool, places such as caves, mines, or hollow trees.

 

· UK bats do not build nests, chew wood/plastic/electric wires, bring food into their roosts, create piles of “guano”, or fly into peoples hair.

 

· Bats are not blind, in fact their vision is very good, however to find their way in the dark they make a series of very high-pitched “squeaks” (which humans normally can not hear without a bat detector) and listen to the returning echoes which bounce back off things in front of them. This is called “echolocation”.