A great escape for bat gone astray

I WAS sitting in the kitchen the other evening when I heard a scrabbling sound coming from a table lamp in the corner.

I assumed it was a large moth that had been attracted by the light and went over to investigate. I got quite a surprise when I found a bat hanging inside the lampshade.

The bat, I think, was equally surprised. It took off and flew around the room a bit before landing on top of a tall press. I was delighted. Many years ago bats were common in and around the house — long-eared bats, pipistrelles and one record of a Leisler’s bat — but I hadn’t seen one for a long time and had assumed they had abandoned the place.

But the kitchen was no place for it to be. It was not just that other members of the household were not as fond of flying mammals as I am, it was also the fact that bats need to eat up to 3,000 flying insects a night in order to survive and the kitchen did not contain that sort of resource. But I knew from experience that they are not easy animals to catch. You can pursue them with an anglers’ landing net or a butterfly net but their echo-location usually allows them to make a last second jink and avoid capture.

I developed a plan. The lamp had been switched on and had an energy-saving bulb that gave off very little heat so it hadn’t cooked the bat. It was the brightest point in the room. Bats are not blind, contrary to popular belief, but their eyesight isn’t good. Perhaps it had thought that the point of brightness offered an escape to the outside world, like the flight hole of its roost when it woke up in the evening.

I opened both kitchen windows and switched off all the lights. The windows were now the brightest points in the room — it wasn’t totally dark outside. I left the room, closing the door behind me, and went to bed, hoping the bat would find its own way out.

The next evening the bat appeared again, flying round our high-ceilinged dining room. My plan obviously hadn’t worked. I spent some time in futile attempts to net it and then decided to try the plan again. The dining room has double patio doors which would offer a much larger escape route than the kitchen windows.

Another failure. The bat reappeared on the third evening, clinging on to the side of the couch. It seemed sluggish and weak, which was not surprising, and had a lot of spiders’ web tangled round its rear end. This time I had no difficulty catching it in a hand net. I removed the cobwebs, identified it as a pipistrelle, though deciding which species of pipistrelle was beyond my competence, and took it out and released it on the patio.

Watching it through the window I realised that I’d made another mistake. Bats can’t take off from a flat surface. But it was crawling energetically towards the nearest shrub where it could climb up and spread its wings. It looked as though it was going to survive its ordeal.

The next wildlife excitement was an email from a reader who’d come across a salamander in Co Limerick and wanted to know if I was interested. I was. The fire salamander is relatively common and widespread in continental Europe but is not found in Ireland. I once met one of these large and extraordinary amphibians in a wood in Austria. But Co Limerick? Well, some people keep exotic pets and sometimes these pets escape. Sadly, when the reader finally emailed me photos, it turned out to be a common or smooth newt.

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