WYBG have been involved with a bat rehabilitation/release effort at Temple Newsam, Leeds.
Please see below some wording from our member Kate Wright who took the lead with coordinating the efforts. A nice little good deed story. Well done to everyone involved.
“On 9th June I received my first call out of the year via a message from staff at Temple Newsam that some baby bats had been found. On arrival I was greeted with a box of four baby Daubenton’s bats. The best course of action with bats so young is to try and re-unite them with their mother. They were taken home for an examination and a feed, then my husband and I got to work making a “release platform”.
The pups were found in the middle of a footpath – on the opposite side of the lake from the presumed roost, and with no other potential tree roosts identified.
With no clear idea of where their roost was, several members of WYBG attempted to reunite the pups with the parents that evening. After several hours of Daubenton’s flying in the area, with little interest shown and no pups picked up, we had to call it a night. With colder wet weather forecast, the pups were taken into the care of the West Yorkshire Bat Hospital.
We can’t know why the babies came to be abandoned in the first place, and unfortunately some of them didn’t make it.
However, “Debbie the Daub” thrived, and under the care of Maggie Brown she learned to fly, feed herself and hide (find a roost), and by early September she was ready for release.
Keen to release her back to home territory, Temple Newsam estate kindly provided and installed a bat box.
The area was scoped out by WYBG volunteers to ensure Daubenton’s were still active in the area, and Debbie was placed into the sealed box and given a few hours to acclimatise before being released in the evening.
Thank you to everyone involved in the rescue and rehabilitation efforts:
Maggie Brown, Jodie Robertson, Charis Russell-Smith, Robert Wright, Josh Turner (West Yorkshire Bat Group) and the staff at Temple Newsam Estate for their care and support.
Temple Newsam provides wonderful habitat for bats, and hopefully with support the populations there will thrive”.
