PIPISTRELLE BAT Pipistrellus pipistrellus
There are over a thousand species of bat on Earth, seventeen
of which live in the UK. Sadly, the majority of British bat species
are endangered or face extinction. At Plas Farm in South Wales,
we have identified just one species - the Pipistrelle. The tiny
Pipistrelle is an insect eating bat whose special talent is to consume
up to 3,000 insects in one night! BBQ enthusiasts will be pleased
to know that most of those are gnats.
BAT WATCHING AT PLAS FARM IN SOUTH WALES
We would love to find more bat species at the farm and
have a bat detector available to our holiday cottage guests which
is great fun to use at dusk around the farm. Look out for Pipistrelles.
They normally emerge about 20 minutes after sunset and circle
the farm buildings, flickering their wings rapidly in a jerky,
erratic flight in pursuit of some grub (quite literally). We also
have a guide book and audio CD to help identify any species you
may hear. If you would like to use it, just ask on arrival at
your holiday cottage. It really is quite astonishing to listen
to them and it is probably a blessing that we can’t hear
them under normal circumstances.
BAT INFO TO BE READ IN DAVID ATTENBOROUGH VOICE
Bats make up one fourth of the mammal species on Earth.
They have existed on this planet for at least 50 million years
and come in a bewildering array of shapes and sizes. Some bats
weigh less than a one penny piece while others are a thousand
times heavier with wing spans of six feet. Some bats can hear
the footsteps of a nearby beetle and others suck blood from living
animals. They belong to an order called Chiroptera, or “hand-winged”,
and the majority of them have one startling ability - to navigate
in total darkness by echolocation. By decoding ‘machine
gun’ bursts of echoes during flight, they are able to build
up a highly accurate picture of the world through which they fly.
A world in which they are the only mammals capable of sustained
flight.
THE BAT CONSERVATION TRUST
You will be pleased to know that there are no blood sucking
six foot bats at Plas Farm, but we still like bats and figured
that as the bats we do have (tiny Pipistrelles) help to make an
evening sitting outside our holiday cottages a very pleasant experience,
we should only help them in return. After all, being mammals they
are our cousins. Indeed, the bat's wing anatomically resembles
the human hand, with extremely elongated fingers and a wing membrane
stretched between. Female bats give birth to one poorly developed
baby bat (known as a pup) which is then nursed on milk from a
pair of pectoral breasts. And if we needed more clues - they even
share our houses! We support the Bat
Conservation Trust.
BATTY TID BITS
“It is currently thought that primates (humans,
apes and monkeys) and bats share a common shrew-like ancestor
and are more closely related to humans than first anticipated.”
Wikipedia
“Their faces are often distorted into gargoyle shapes that
appear hideous to us until we see them for what we are, exquisitely
fashioned instruments for beaming ultrasound in desired directions.”
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker
“How does a bat keep track of its own echoes, and avoid
being mislead by the echoes of other bats? It seems that bats
use some sort of ‘strangeness filter’. The bat’s
brain relies upon the assumption that the world portrayed by any
one echo pulse will be either the same as the world portrayed
by previous pulses, or only slightly different: the insect being
tracked may have moved a little for instance.” Richard Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
