Pipistrelle Bat
🌿 Habitat: Woodland edges, parks, gardens, rivers and hedgerows
📍 Found in Britain: Very common
📏 Size: Tiny bat with a wingspan of 18–25cm
🌙 Season: Most active April–October, hibernates in winter
🦟 Wildlife Connections: Eats huge numbers of midges, mosquitoes and tiny flying insects
👀 Look out for: Fast zig-zag flying at dusk, especially around trees, water and streetlights
🎧 Listen for: Soft rapid chirping sounds (usually only heard with a bat detector)
⚠️ Warning: Bats are protected in the UK, never disturb roosts
✨ Fun Fact: A pipistrelle can eat around 3,000 insects in a single night!
The tiny bat that can gobble thousands of insects a night.
In May, we went to a brilliant night safari event at SCEEC, which included a quiz about bats. That’s where I learned how little I know about them, followed by a walk around the reserve with bat detectors, spotting and hearing our furry winged friends.
The pipistrelle bat is the UK’s most common bat. With its wings folded up, it’s about the size of an adult thumb. Its wings are massive compared to the rest of its body. If you spread your arms out wide, the wingspan would stretch from your fingertips down to your ankles.
I don’t know how I reached my 40s without realising that bats hibernate, but there you go. It explains why we don’t see many when the nights draw in. They can eat up to 3,000 insects a night, so when insect numbers get too low in winter, they settle down for a long kip.
They also do a clever thing called delayed impregnation, where they mate in autumn and then hibernate. The sperm is stored, and if conditions are good in spring, the female releases the egg to be fertilised. This means they aren’t wasting energy trying to raise babies in terrible conditions. They usually give birth to one pup a year in early summer, and the females often group together in nursery colonies to raise their young.
If you go for a walk at dusk, keep an eye out for small, jerky movements as they catch insects in the air. Around 20 minutes after sunset is a great time to spot them, particularly around woods and streams. They use echolocation calls to find insects, at frequencies too high for most of us to hear (although some younger children might manage it). A bat detector is a brilliant, though rather pricey, way to hear them at around 45kHz.
All bats are protected under UK law, so make sure you don’t disturb them or the places where they are roosting.
Wildcard Fact:
It’s so small that, with its wings folded up, it could fit inside a matchbox and weighs about the same as a 20p coin.
