Noctule bats in Shropshire

Some years ago now we were sitting watching television when something passed through the room on the periphery of our vision and disappeared into my study. When I went to investigate I found a Pipistrelle bat clinging to one of the long curtains covering the bay window. Not wanting to handle it, I searched out a butterfly net I had in the garage, caught the bat in it and put it back outside where it belonged. Further investigation showed there was a window open along the upstairs landing the bat must have come in through.

August bank holiday Monday was a very hot day in Shropshire and we had been sitting outside on the patio watching the martins catching insects high in the sky above us. Just after we came indoors from doing that around 6.30 pm something which looked very like a swallow in shape flew into our kitchen and then disappeared from view entirely, though we went from room to room downstairs looking for it. It seemed unlikely it could have been a bird had flown into the house like that, because previous experience of birds doing that is that they fly around in a panic and are difficult to control. This intruder had disappeared completely. With our previous experience of having a bat in the house we thought that was a more likely intruder.

We saw nothing more of the intruder and had begun to believe it must have flown back out as swiftly as it had flown in though we hadn’t seen it go.

We went to bed around midnight and I came out of my bedroom almost immediately to come face to face with something with large pointed wings flying at high speed along the landing. At my sudden appearance in front of it it wheeled into the adjacent bathroom and I closed the door behind it so it couldn’t escape, wondering how I was going to open the window in there to let it out without it coming back onto the landing past me. When I opened the bathroom door to do just that, however, it was no longer there. I met it coming back up the stairs at high speed and assumed it must have escaped via the gaps around the pipes leading from either the sink or the bath.

I went to put on the overall I wear when looking at my bees, because I had only been wearing pyjamas until that point. Coming back up the stairs wearing it I met the fast moving creature just flying down the stairs to escape my wife, who had appeared at the top of them at that moment. At my sudden appearance in its path again it wheeled away into the study to avoid me. Lucky for all of us that was, because the study has a door I was able to fix and stand in front of so it couldn’t escape back into the house.

It was clear by now this was some sort of bat, though not a Pipistrelle this time. It clung to the same curtains that had whilst I opened the windows at either side of the study and with frequent bursts of rapid speed on those long pointed wings, it eventually made its way to the larger of the windows, out of it and away.

Consulting the internet the next day showed our visitor to have been the largest of the British bats, a Noctule, noted for its rapid flight on pointed wings. The internet also said Noctule bats fly two hours either side of dusk, often in the company of Martins, so I suppose that was what it had been doing when it accidently strayed into our kitchen.

I also suppose the reason we didn’t see it after it had done that was that it had been hiding from potential enemies in the shape of two humans, who might have harmed it in some way if they’d come across it, until we seemed to have gone to bed, after which it came out from wherever it had been hiding and tried to find its own route to freedom. It wouldn’t have succeeded though without my help, because we don’t leave windows open overnight. Who knows what might have happened to its bid for freedom without me there to help it on its way.