Thursday - August 06, 2009

How a bat can drive you to despair.

Hey I do have a soft spot for feathers and fur and stuff. Can’t help it.  BUT ... this gets a tad outta hand.  Read this and see if they aren’t a bit OTT here.
No wait. Maybe a LOT OTT.  And all over a teaspoon of what?

I caught this in the property section of the weekend paper and have posted all of it here. 
Have fun with this one folks.  Oh yeah ...
Wardmama take note.  This guy shouldda called on you.

Property: How a bat can drive you to despair
It was when a conservationist found a teaspoon of bat dung in the barn that the nightmare began.

By Christopher Hudson

The nice woman in a tweed skirt came to our back door with a teaspoon, and for the next three months it drove us to the edge of despair. We were selling our house, and early in the year, a couple had fallen in love with it and made an offer that we accepted. They were going to convert our open cart barn into an annex for a housekeeper: something for which we had planning permission, but had never got around to doing ourselves.

However, somebody on Ashford Council, leafing through documents, must have clocked the word ‘’barn’’ on our renewal form. Wheels spun. Alarm bells rang. Barns might be the habitat of protected species: this could be a conservation issue. They wanted photographs. We gave them photographs, clambering into the brick loft space and shooting pictures from all angles. No sign of bats.

But in the meantime the council had passed the matter over to Natural England, the environment watchdog charged with protecting bats and other protected species under the Wildlife and Countryside Act. A young woman from the agency wrote back: “I have reviewed the photographs with our species specialist and it is possible that bats and owls could be using the building. The open bays may be too draughty for roosting bats, but they may use this part as access to the brick building, which appears more enclosed and which may also have potential for bats within the roof tiles, ridges, loft spaces, etc. We would therefore recommend that a bat and owl survey is carried out of the entire structure.”

Enter the woman in the tweed skirt. Philippa, as I shall call her, arrived on our doorstep and asked if she could take a look around outside – and perhaps in our attic? We settled on outside. She came back half an hour later from the barn, holding two minute objects in a tiny cup. As she wrote later, one was half a teaspoonful of disintegrated bat droppings. The other was a single butterfly wing. “Not much of anything there,” I joked. Philippa agreed with a smile. “But I’m afraid I have to make a note of it, or I wouldn’t be doing my job.”

That was at the end of January. No problem. There were months to go before we had to exchange contracts with our purchasers. But we hadn’t reckoned on Natural England. You don’t need to see bats, or owls: simply to detect the potential presence of one on or near the planning application site is enough to set the watchdog slavering. Its remit is to survey trees, unoccupied buildings and other structures where bats or owls, might roost. Failure to comply with the rules – and I am quoting Natural England – can result in fines or a custodial sentence.

A butterfly wing and a half-teaspoonful of dessicated bat dropping were enough for Natural England to object to our application for renewed planning permission “pending results of a bat and owl survey” – since it threw in the possibility of barn owls although there was no trace of them, as Natural England later admitted. With this, the long nightmare began.

By this time, late January had slid into early March. “I’m not going to move house again until I’m carried out in my coffin,” vowed my wife. Our buyers were generously willing to delay completion – there were other unresolved issues – but we could not expect them to wait indefinitely. On March 22, our Natural England bat survey arrived. It began with a primer on the 16 species of bat to be found in Britain – how they were insectivorous and nocturnal, and did not vandalise people’s homes by chewing wires or the fabric of the building. We were further informed that each bat demands a specific ambience for its home, and abhors dirt and cobwebs. Turning the page, we came to Natural England’s conclusions.

It confirmed the single butterfly wing and the half-teaspoonful of disintegrated bat droppings, from which it hypothesised that a solitary brown long-eared bat had passed this way on its way to somewhere else. It dropped the barn owl, but spotted instead two derelict swallows’ nests. These would require us to build artificial swallows’ nests in the barn which would have to be constructed outside the breeding period of April-June. As for the hypothetical bats, we agreed to build a bat loft along the top of the lodge bays which would offer “significant enhancements” for them should they deign to visit our home.

Then came the whammy. In its conclusion, Natural England ordained that, “to ensure no potentially damaging works are carried out, it is recommended that no works are carried out on the cart lodge until after the May repeat bat survey”, warning that DEFRA would need to be consulted before any conversion of the barn could begin. Meanwhile, a further four bat surveys would have to be carried out during the next six months, and a recommended annual inspection of the bat lofts and artificial birds’ nests for the next five years.

In vain did we explain to Natural England that the sale of our home could only go ahead if there were no legal constraints on the property. In vain did we protest that our whole future was at stake for the sake of a butterfly wing and a fingernail’s worth of ancient bat droppings. The agency was already looking forward to providing “a substantial increase in current nesting areas for swallows and roosting sites for bats” where currently there were no bats or swallows at all. The borough council took its cue from Natural England. By the time we had built the “bat palace”, as we named it, in the eaves, and given the swallows their artificial nests, and Natural England had withdrawn its objections, it would have been too late to sort out the planning consent before the exchange of contracts.

We were dead lucky. The couple who liked our house wanted it enough to steer through the barn’s planning permission themselves. For all I know, they are still annually hosting a surveyor crouching bat-like in the barn’s roof space to count the bats during their annual “emergence”. Good luck to them.

A BAT FOR SOOTH

Posted by peiper     on 08/06/2009 at 08:20 AM   
Filed Under: • Animals • Daily Life • UK •  
• Comments (6) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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