A wing and a prayer
Darkness falls reluctantly in high summer. Having hiked 20km from my home in East Devon along a rollercoaster stretch of the South West Coast Path, I follow a dusty track to a farm in time for nightfall. Green woodpeckers snigger in the nearby willow; crickets and grasshoppers sing the meadows into sunset. Finally I arrive at an enormous old stone barn, where I hope to witness the flight of one of Britain’s rarest mammals: the grey long-eared bat.
East Devon is home to two of the species’ eight known maternity roosts in England. One of them is inside this barn, surrounded by unimproved grassland yielding an array of insect prey – key to the bat’s survival. I join a cadre of eight hopeful bat-watchers stationed at various points around the building, our detectors programmed to pick up sonar frequencies of 30–50kHz. Among our number are Craig Dunton, lead project officer for the Bat Conservation Trust (BCT) and Back from the Brink (see the box on page 76), and Neil Aldridge, wildlife photographer and film-maker, who is assembling a complicated-looking rig. Together we watch and we wait,
