Jane Smith
Jane Smith is a writer and campaigner living in Cheshire. Her writing on environmental and animal themes has appeared in the journal Dark Mountain as well as the Huffington Post and Sentient Media. In 2021 her essay ‘Crossings’ was short-listed for the inaugural Future Places Environmental Essay Prize and the Van der Mey Non-Fiction Prize. She runs Staffordshire Wounded Badger Patrol, manages her local migratory toad crossing, and is deputy leader of the Animal Welfare Party.
Twenty of us stood masked and slightly nervous in the brightly-lit prefab hut, ready to be initiated into a whole new world of nocturnal life. Phil from the local bat group showed us photos of brown long-eared bats, talked about bat altruism and touched on the wonder of the nursery roosts he’d seen.
He brought out a Perspex box and gently showed us Dobby the bat, who’d been found covered in toxic dust after he’d crawled into a window crevice treated with ant powder. Tiny and vulnerable, a thumb of chocolate brown fur next to a darker folded wing, Dobby seemed to simultaneously illustrate his inalienable bat-ness as well as our uniquely human inability to co-exist with the wider natural world – but his being here at all was also testament to the kindness and expertise of his rescuers. His carry box was layered with pale blue disposable face masks, in line with strict regulations around humans not passing coronavirus onto wild animals. At that moment, the very last thing I wanted in the entire world would be for people – a species that had attempted to blame the bat nation for a global pandemic surely attributable to human folly – to pass this virus on to the miniscule and precariously recuperating Dobby.
Following Phil out into the wood at dusk, bat detector in hand, we listened, amazed, to the crackle, slap and tap of the bats around us. Switching frequencies to tune in to pipistrelles and daubentons, it struck me that what the world needed right now, and urgently, was for humans to switch frequencies in the way we live our lives, to a kinder, more inclusive way of being where we could acknowledge other species, understand and admire them, and respect their difference, their habitat and their idiosyncrasies as a part of our beautiful, huge, shared world.
At one point, Phil laid his torch on the ground next to a body of water. Within seconds bats were swooping out across the misting surface, white bellies flashing in the light of the beam, flying at immense speeds while they fed above the water.
We humans generally have very little awareness of the different environments needed for other species to thrive, including on our own doorsteps. I’d known that certain types of bats fed over the water, but it was only after I took up open water swimming that I properly noticed, because I swam under them, the very striking band of insect multitudes that gather in a hovering brown stripe across the surface of local lakes on certain evenings. I imagine that our human ancestors knew all about this, being so much more connected to what happens outside of human lives in forests, lakes, streams, clearings and valleys. Our 21st century disconnect from nature – perhaps more properly known as The Living World – is enormous, and tragic.
Bats could easily be the poster species for our limited human understanding of wider ecosystems. So much is still being discovered about them – but more than that, their habitat and their needs are almost completely overlooked in our daily lives. When trees are felled for housing development, bats suffer. When hedgerows are lost for road building, when the lights are left on all night in fulfilment warehouses, when 5G masts are built, when woods are cleared to make way for HS2, bats are casualties of all of it.
We should care about bats and what happens to them because they were here long before we were and they have an inalienable right to be here in our shared world. A world without bats would be unimaginable – and an unforgivable trespass against their species. They’re an integral part of our ecosystems, and the beauty and wonder they bring to the world around us is beyond human words.
I don’t know why the sight of a bat swirling between the trees at high speed gives me goosebumps. I don’t know why hearing their movements resonate on a hand-held bat detector is such an indescribable thrill. I don’t know why seeing Dobby in his plastic box made me root so hard for him to survive that I inadvertently clenched my fingers into my palms. But the not knowing is part of the great mystery of bats – they’re enigmatic, a world unto themselves that exists simultaneously within and parallel to our own human world, and something about them awakens something mysterious in me too, perhaps something we half-remember from many millennia ago.
Back home, I gasped as a bat, or perhaps two bats, swooped in front of the kitchen window, then were brilliantly gone again almost in the same instant. I felt a strange sadness; entire species of bats could disappear just as easily in our built-up, lit up, het-up world.
Eager to shed some of my melancholy, I turned on the radio and station-hopped from Classic FM to Radio Stoke and back again, looking to find something comforting. No luck.
Frequencies, and listening or receiving, were the key. We humans have closed ourselves off, somewhere along the line, to the vibrations of the Earth and to the multitudinous frequencies of the natural world all around us. But just one hour at dusk in the company of bats reminded me that there is joy, wonder and a way forward to be found in opening ourselves out to the throbbing pulses in nature. If, like the bats, we can become attuned to something bigger than us, older than us and stronger than us, then there’s hope for us going forwards, and hope for all the species whose habitats, lives and survival depend on our awakening.
The bats have got it right – the Earth is singing all the time, and we just need to learn to listen to find the right way through.
Jane Smith is a writer and campaigner living in Cheshire. Her writing on environmental and animal themes has appeared in the journal Dark Mountain as well as the Huffington Post and Sentient Media. In 2021 her essay ‘Crossings’ was short-listed for the inaugural Future Places Environmental Essay Prize and the Van der Mey Non-Fiction Prize. She runs Staffordshire Wounded Badger Patrol, manages her local migratory toad crossing, and is deputy leader of the Animal Welfare Party.
Call to action: Join the Bat Conservation Trust at https://www.bats.org.uk/.