Edward Wells - Somerset Bat Group

This week we sit down with Edward Wells from the Somerset Bat Group and talk about bats in the county and the work being done to protect them. Edward’s interest in bats started when he was a child and has seen the bat group turn 40 with years of hands-on conservation. We discuss the county’s varied landscapes, how bat conservation has changed over the years, and some of the Somerset Bat Group’s key successes. Edward also reflects on how new technology has shaped bat research, shares examples of projects driven by local volunteers, and explains why the involvement of both amateurs and professionals still matters. Above all, he talks about working together and why there’s reason to be hopeful about the future of bats.

Hear more from Somerset Bat Group with the two previous episodes:

Frome after Dark; A Town on the Hunt for Bats

An Evening with Somerset's Rarest Bat

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Chapters

• 0:12 Welcome to Bat Chat
• 11:34 Somerset's Unique Bat Habitats
• 17:41 Milestones in Bat Conservation
• 21:44 The Importance of Bat Records
• 26:59 Future of Bat Conservation
• 28:42 Memorable Bat Encounters
• 31:58 Engaging the Next Generation

Transcript

Steve Roe

[0:00]Welcome to another episode of this brand new series of the Bat Conservation Trust's award-winning podcast, BatChat.

Steve Roe

[0:12]I'm Steve Rowe, your host, and if you don't know by now, this is Series 7, and a new episode is being released every other Wednesday until the spring of 2026. Last time we were in the Yorkshire Dales inside a lime kiln. This week we're headed to the southwest of England, to the county of Somerset. Edward Wells has been a long-standing member of the Somerset Bat Group, and in 2024 I went to his home in a little village to the south of the county. You'll hear a reference to Somerset Bat Group approaching 40 years old, but as we are now in 2025, they turned 40 this year. Sat in his lounge, a very large window looked out across the garden to a block of woodland at the end of the garden. I started off by asking where his love of bats began and how long ago it started.

Edward Wells

[0:56]Well, my late father was an old-fashioned grammar school biology teacher and one of the founding members of Hampshire Wildlife Trust. So I had wildlife from the cradle. And conservation, almost before they'd invented the word. So I've always been a conservationist, always been curious about things. And actually, I was singing in a concert in one of the villages in Somerset. Came out, nice June evening, came out into the churchyard, two different sizes of bats flying around it. So I rang up the wildlife trust and said, who's the expert who can tell me what the bats are in Shepton Beach and Churchyard? And they said, oh, we don't know, try NCC as it then was, so I rang NCC and said, who can tell me what the bats are in Shepton Beach and Churchyard? And they said, where's Shepton Beach? Nobody knew. Very soon after that, there was a talk by Henry Arnold of ITE.

Edward Wells

[2:03]Which after the 81 Act had come in, they needed people to do back conservation work. And I went along to that, and every other sentence that Henry said began, we don't know or we're not sure. And I was thinking, well, this is daft. These are relatively conspicuous mammals. Relatively numerous. They live in our houses. Why don't we know anything about them? So the curiosity got the better of me, and I volunteered to take it further. Did a day's worth of training with Tony Hudson, in the course of which we actually went off-piste and trespassed a little, because one of the people in the party said, I know a tunnel here which sometimes has bats in it so we sneaked into this tunnel and i got about as close to a half-awake lesser horseshoe bat as i am to you and it was all downhill from there i've been obsessed with lesser horseshoes since my wife's got dragged along both my sons became ecological consultants doing bad work um yes and lessers have got a lot to answer for so.

Steve Roe

[3:15]For listeners who haven't been to the county of Somerset we've got listeners all over the world set the scene for us listeners have probably heard of Glastonbury the Mendip Hills Cheddar Gorge but what sort of habitats have you got and therefore why have you got the types of bats that you've got

Edward Wells

[3:29]One of the reasons I loved Somerset and do love Somerset is that it's got an extraordinary range of habitats in quite a small space, you've got the limestone of the Mendips which everybody knows about full of holes nice caves with ancient woodland and unimproved pastures. So ideal horseshoe territory... One of the centre points in the country for greater horseshoe bats. Then you come down onto the levels, which are a bit like East Anglia, except they've got hills running through them. So you get the Polden Ridge and the Five Head Ridge and so on, and those are unique. There's a story I heard many years ago of a group of Japanese scientists who flew into Heathrow and the first thing they asked was to be taken to the Somerset Levels. They're that strange. Not as good for horseshoes, although there are both horseshoe species at Canada Farm near Shapwick, but magnificent for Dolbentons.

Edward Wells

[4:46]Soprano pips, Nathusius prips, almost certainly. We haven't actually confirmed breeding but i'm sure it's there so that's a range of species then there's the quantox and the edge of exmoor and brendan hills all of which are quite high level heathland barbastole country very nice um and the blackdown hills where where we are now which are just weird i mean you could get almost anything on the black down So, slightly base rich at the top of the hill, acid bog halfway down. So you get immense range of different habitats in there. And a lot of ancient, well, not a lot of, because it's poor in trees, but a certain amount of ancient woodland and some very unintensive farming. I don't think they've heard of chemicals on some of the farms on the Blackdowns. So, yes, wonderful stuff there again. It's a good county.

Steve Roe

[5:52]Yeah, you mentioned a few roosts and places they're recognised. A Canada farm I've visited with Dan Hargreaves, and you mentioned the Quantocks. I've done a bats and trees course there with Henry Andrews, looking at all the butter out there. So, yeah, really nice county, like you say. so it's coming up to 40 years old now somerset bat group and you were there pretty much at the start what has changed in that time you know give us a sense for i've only been doing bat work for the last 20 25 years give us a sense for what bat work was like back then and how it is different to now well

Edward Wells

[6:27]When the group started we were, literally all amateurs, various professions. The chap who was largely responsible for starting it was a retired butcher.

Edward Wells

[6:43]We had a number of school teachers, we had a couple of surveyors, myself as a lawyer, and the most dedicated back-botherer of us all, I suspect, was a window cleaner. Um so it was a grand old mix and we were all learning as we went along um not only henry arnold but everyone else didn't know anything much and part of the delight of it was that almost anything you found was new yeah you know you were putting dots on a map that was completely blank, um now of course back groups are dominated by professional ecologists, most of the people in the group the active people in the group are consultants or similar.

Edward Wells

[7:32]And we were messing around with crude bat detectors no think of harp trapping and lures and all these wonderful things and certainly no remote bat recorders I mean my first bat detector was a QMC Mini, yeah um pete banfield in the group still in the group now i know couldn't afford one of those so he vandalized a tandy mobile ray transistor radio yeah and that did him very i found my qmc a while back i turned it on again it was a poorly terrible piece but it was the only affordable one there was So that's what we had.

Edward Wells

[8:18]So yeah, I mean, the makeup of the group in terms of what we do for a living, has changed enormously.

Steve Roe

[8:26]You've served as chairman of Somerset Bat Grupa and your wife Helen is secretary, but your main role over the years has been county recorders. What sort of milestones have you reached? And in terms of what bats you've got in the county, it's probably easier to say what you haven't got since the county, isn't it?

Edward Wells

[8:42]Of the 17, 18 species, if you count the mouse herd, we have 16 breeding in the county. Paul Kennedy, bless him, who's tried like mad, heart-trapping all around the place to try and find Al-Kathoe. It's not here. Dan Whitby himself, who has Al-Kathoe's coming out of his ears, has done a lot of work on the potential dueling of the A358. He hasn't found any either. And if Dan can't find them here, I suspect we haven't got them. But we've got everything else. In terms of what's changed over the years, well, of course, when we started, there were only pipistrels, not common pipistrels and soprano pipistrels. So some of the early records could be either. It was a long time before I accepted we had Lyslers. And our current chairman, Paul Kennedy, was then working at the RSPCA place at West Hatch. And I'd offered a prize for the first authentic Lyslers. So I got this phone message from Paul saying, just one thing to say to you, liceless. And somebody had brought in a grounded liceless bat, so he got the bottle of wine.

Edward Wells

[10:02]But one of the most interesting things, and I've been quoted on this in the past, one of the most interesting things I found with the records was that when we started, Serratins were in the east and south of the county, a swathe from Wincanton through the Oval down through to Chart there was I think at that time one known maternity roost in Devon somewhere near Axminster.

Edward Wells

[10:32]And as the records started to come in we found them further and further across the county they're now well established in Devon there are breeding roosts in Cornwall, At the start, I couldn't be sure that that wasn't because there were more people identifying them. But it was so pronounced over a period of time that serratins had moved. Talked to people and talked to Shirley Thompson in Kent or people in Cambridgeshire, which was a stronghold of serratins in the 1950s, and they say that they're virtually vanishing from there. And I've got a pet theory, which I can't prove, but serotins love dung beetles.

[11:34]

Somerset's Unique Bat Habitats

Edward Wells

[11:27]Untreated cow pats are not that unusual in Somerset. You find me an untreated cow pat in Cambridge. Yeah. There aren't any. And I think they've just moved where the food is. But we were yeah but we're strong on serotins here but yes we've got pretty well all the species we can expect to have except alcozoa and are.

Steve Roe

[11:53]You still of county recorded now

Edward Wells

[11:55]We are it it's lapsed a bit and and we've got seriously behind partly because there've been difficulties with the record center and somerset we were only ever an outstation the somerset environmental record center and they've had various difficulties and I'm still getting over this. There's a backlog at the moment. And it's also become difficult to do the role that we started with, with so many more people putting records on, straight, directly on, High Naturalist and so on. And so many of the surveys that are being done, being done commercially by consultants who are obliged to send the records into the record centre, but not necessarily obliged to send them via us so there's probably a fairly hefty mismatch between what we've got and what the record centre's got but we still try and keep up with them keep up to date so.

Steve Roe

[12:53]Over the years there's been various projects i presume give us a flavor for what sort of projects you've had to find out more about the bats in the county

Edward Wells

[13:01]Well in the early days we did a few sort of mass surveys, of which easily the most bizarre was one of the first we did. It was a minor stately home miles away from anywhere. We did a stakeout. Henry Arnold actually set that one up. Unfortunately, the night we chose was also the night that some villains chose to break into the outbuilding. So Henry was taken off to talk to the police about the getaway car. And he, brilliant naturalist, wonderful knowledge, almost all natural species, but hadn't a clue about makes of car. Not a clue. But the lovely woman who owned the place decided we were her honoured guests and supplied us with a glass of wine and a warm pastry puff full of strawberry jam. Yes. Well, I don't know how other people do bat surveys, but with a torch in one hand and a detector in the other. It's difficult to know where you put your glass.

Edward Wells

[14:05]And Doug Woods, the man who almost started the group, emerged from the inner courtyard where he'd been counting out the less horses with strawberry jam all the way down the front of his shirt. He looked like a casualty from the trenches looking for the field hospital. So I'll never forget that one. But initially it tended to be individual surveys, There's places that people had known, had said there were bats, and you need more than a couple of people to surround them and so on. That gradually, of course, got taken over more by the professional consultancy stuff, so there was less call for that, although we did still offer our services from time to time to people. The other thing, of course, that happened was the National Bat Monitoring Programme started up, and that has involved most of us in doing our roosts during the summer months. So that's a different bit. In terms of projects, I think the one of which I'm most proud and most pleased began in 2006.

Edward Wells

[15:21]Kath Shellswall, still a major force in the group, was appointed as Mendham Hills officer for the Somerset Wildlife Trust, charged with bringing the community in touch with their wildlife.

Edward Wells

[15:38]And how do you do that? Well, she decided to set up a big bat survey.

Edward Wells

[15:45]Which ran for six years, one night in August, teams of four people with a detector, a sheet to record what you had, and two people coming along just for the fun.

Edward Wells

[15:59]And we got a huge response to that in terms of people coming along, traipsing around Mendips and Pitch Dark, which isn't the safest thing to do, but they did it. And we got okay it's because it's one night only it's not terribly useful scientific data but we found bats in places we weren't expecting them we found over the six years differences in where they were serotins again seemed to be very dependent on where the cows were and that checked there was one, tree I remember that had myotis passes going around it and around it. We could never work out whether it was a lot of bats or just one that was going bananas but there were about 70 passes in a five minute. The protocol for that was based on the NBMP field so it was walk, stop, walk, stop and that went so well that we then set up another one, set up another one for the black downs and we thought when we had that won't get so many people because it's further away from bristol and card nations and so on um again six years of that one time we had 70 people wow sign on for it um.

Steve Roe

[17:19]A lot it's a lot of detectors to find people

Edward Wells

[17:22]Well you had one detect data per group so it was one detector per transect and there were a lot of people coming on just for the fun but um i don't where they all came from. It was wonderful. And then we did four years of a similar thing on the Brew Valley, so based on Shapwick and...

[17:41]

Milestones in Bat Conservation

Edward Wells

[17:41]Middle of the levels and that only ran for four years but that one in some ways i think produced more valuable data than the other two but it got people interested in bats and i still get people coming up so yeah i was on the bat down surveys you did well yes a lot of people were but those were great fun i did actually deliver a speech about them at one of the bat conferences which It was fun. But since then, of course, we've got into trapping and so on, and our current chairman, Paul Kennedy, he's doing harp trapping all over the place. One of the things he did, which I'm quite pleased with, was, you remember the Becksteins? So they, where the protocol was set up by Frank Greenaway in Sussex and had a minimum size wood for it. Well, that made eminent sense in Shaft 6.

Edward Wells

[18:44]We weren't convinced it was sensible in Somerset, where there were a lot of very suitable-looking woods, but below his minimum size. So Paul followed up with that, got a licence to enable him to do some of these likely-looking woods that didn't fit the protocol. And we have found out far more about Bechstein's bats in Somerset than we could ever have done any other way. And there are a number of really quite small woods with breeding backsteins in them. Now he's chasing Grey Longhead with Dan Hargreaves and it'll be very interesting to see what comes of that. He's also done a fair bit of work in Taunton. Nick Tomlinson briefly worked for the Somerset Trust doing a thing on the interconnectedness of the landscape with the River Tone. So he did a lot of back work on that. And the other thing which Andy Avery, our current treasurer, has set up is not a bit bat survey but a big bat count, which is basically lending out audio moths and getting eye records from that. And that seems to be going extremely well and of course is based on conurbations.

Edward Wells

[20:04]Following on Nick's work. And in any case, I think that it's very easy to underestimate the value of back gardens for bats. And I suspect, short of the really sort of densely populated towns, I suspect that most towns and villages, certainly in rural England, have got bats flying around the garden all the time. We just don't look for them there. Look for them on nice nature reserves. No, they're about. They're highly mobile. They're opportunistic. There's food there. They will go there.

Steve Roe

[20:43]You touched on the big bat count that Andy's doing. We're visiting that in another episode. And again, the Grey Long Gear Project with Paul and Dan, we're looking at it in another episode. The interconnectivity is interesting. You produced one of the first ever local bat groups booklet, Distribution of Bats and Somersets, yourself and Helen. In 1998 it rapidly sold out at the following years back conference that booklet what did it show at the time are there particular trends and were you able to see that interconnectivity of different habitats just how important perhaps are they

Edward Wells

[21:16]As I said that the principal thing that I got out of it was the spread of serotins otherwise I think looking back at it now what it chiefly shows is how sparse our records were knowing the work that's been done since particularly with the trapping exercises that Paul has been doing, it's in lots of ways much more informative. And even that, of course, turns up strange things that you don't understand.

[21:44]

The Importance of Bat Records

Edward Wells

[21:45]I mean, his Becksteins were all on the east side of the M5. Yeah. He didn't find anything the other side of the motorway. Why not? Woods look as good. Um, no, I mean, there's an immense amount we don't understand and don't know, and it'd be lovely to.

Steve Roe

[22:07]What's your view on state of bat conservation at the moment? You've said a few things there, what you think is done well, you know, more people doing stuff, doing more advanced surveys. Are there any areas that you think we could be doing things better at?

Edward Wells

[22:20]Oh, that's a difficult one. I think almost certainly, but I'm not sure that it's me. and say I've been in the bat group for 39 at least of its 40 years. I've got past climbing into people's roofs now, although I still do the MBMP service. Yeah, I fear that there's a lot of data that's not being put together and we need another up-to-date atlas of where bats are in Somerset. Somebody needs to put that together and interpret it. And I'm also genuinely worried about ever increasing reliance on static detectors and on predictive software. Static detectors, I can quite see why they're so popular, but I've always thought that it's worthwhile seeing the creature as well, and seeing what it's doing. And some of the predictive software, I think, it needs to be used intelligently, it needs to be carefully, it can have come up with some very strange answers indeed.

Steve Roe

[23:39]You mentioned just before we hit the record button you're out last night doing a lesser horseshoe count for the mbmp and you've got another two coming up next week and you said at the start of this lesser horseshoe's are definitely the favorite why so

Edward Wells

[23:50]Well it was a lesser horseshoe i fell in love with um on that day with tony hudson they're quirky they're classy they live in nice places on a heterodion detector they make the most ridiculous noise of any mammal a wonderful warbly noise they have gloriously thin matchstick legs and when they're hibernating wrapped up if you start to disturb them they bend their knees pull themselves up quite delightful way they flutter in flight they're not gung-ho like noctuals are charging around the place and yeah I don't understand them and again it's this business that every bat person gets into of trying to imagine what it's like to be a bat and I can just about figure out how you might live in a world where you get the echoes back from 30 kilohertz 45 kilohertz a world in which you're echolocating at 112 kilohertz.

Edward Wells

[25:00]You can't hear anything more than about a foot away from you. And yet you're finding your food, you're avoiding obstacles, you're avoiding people. Unless a horse will fly to within about a foot of you and then whip around the side of you. But what kind of world is that? It's our world, but my goodness, it's a different view of it. So yeah, I love them. I think they're smashing.

Steve Roe

[25:26]So a lot of things have happened over the last 40 years, some really good milestones. What would you like to see happen over the next 40 years in the future?

Edward Wells

[25:33]Well, I'm sure I won't be able to see it, but I say there's more of the overall picture of not only where bats are, but why they're where they are. I think that bat will develop over time, provided all bat workers aren't constantly trying to decide where people put motorways and so on. So that needs to be done. I think it would be lovely to know more about the social organization of bats. The thing I always quote, which I'm never going to live long enough to see, is you get a roast of a hundred and something pipistrels. They come out in 35 minutes every night. One, two, three, four, five, then a gap, then one, two, three, then a gap. We've all done it. Who decides which one comes out first we haven't a clue you hear them chattering in the roost before they emerge is that a committee meeting is do they push the least um gung-ho out first to see if it's safe does the most um adventurous female come out first or is there a matriarch in there somewhere who says your turn gertie you go this time we haven't a clue it would be lovely

[26:59]

Future of Bat Conservation

Edward Wells

[26:52]to know how that's organized because to get them all out in 35 minutes it is organized and.

Steve Roe

[26:59]It'd be nice to know if that's the same across all species or whether it's different for each individual species as well i guess

Edward Wells

[27:04]Well it gets more complicated with some other species i mean the horseshoes and natural spats um they come out and go straight back in again which is another awkward thing that That's what we used to. And why do they do that? It's always called light sampling. It's got absolutely nothing to do with sampling the light. And if it has a survival value, why don't they all do it? It's just some of them that do it. So I don't know what they're up to there. We'd love to know.

Steve Roe

[27:35]I was going to ask what message would you give to everyone listening now who's involved in bat conservation, but I guess one of those is send in the records and start collaborating to join those dots. But is there anything you would want to say to those people listening now who are going to take bat conservation into that next 40, 50 years plus?

Edward Wells

[27:52]Good luck. No, I'm sorry I won't be around to see it. I mean, I'm now 78, so I won't be around for much longer. But yeah there's still an immense amount to find out don't don't panic don't give up, as a conservation professional conservationists suffer from the fact that all they're ever doing is minimizing damage and that can get very depressing for them but at the end of the day the animals are beautiful and they're fascinating and they're lovely and keep working on them because there's an immense amount to find out. And there is a real danger of losing them if we don't take care of them. So, yeah, no, it's going to be an exciting 40 years for them.

[28:42]

Memorable Bat Encounters

Steve Roe

[28:42]40 years you've seen countless numbers of bats and roosts. Have you got any particular encounters that stand out?

Edward Wells

[28:50]Ooh, yeah. a long, long time ago.

Edward Wells

[28:56]Sitting in a upstairs room of a semi-derelict house, still had the roof on there, and having... Best part of 20 greater horseshoe bats wanging around the room warming up before they set off and i had a bat detector the other person in the room hadn't got one and she said, they're all so silent but i had a bat they were shouting their heads off they were just doing it 185 kilohertz. That was terrific. It was, yeah, no, everyone, everyone's good. I was cock-a-hoop this winter, yes, one of my hibernation sites where I found between three different bits but the same population as you have. We clocked up 136 hibernating lesson worship hats it's the largest hibernation site for lessons in the county and i i came away very happy from that one but no every time it's different every time it's interesting um there are favorite occasions but there'll be another one next week.

Steve Roe

[30:21]I'd be happy with just one hibernation lesson where i come from in the midlands Give us a feel for what's the feeling of Somerset Bat Group at the minute.

Edward Wells

[30:30]I'm very, very lucky, and we're very lucky, that throughout the whole 40 years, Somerset Bat Group has always been good-tempered. And that isn't true of all Bat Groups, I know. But we've never had a rancorous meeting, ever. And I think that was due in part, at least, to our second chairman and regular chairman for many years, Dave Cottrell. A teacher, a bat trainer par excellence, he trained, Lord knows how many people he trained, including some people now quite high up in the bat world. But he's one of the most gentle and kindly people I've met. And if there was any sort of friction started, then they just quietly defuse it. And yeah, by and large, we get on very well. We don't always agree, but we get on very well. The aviaries, Adele and Andy, have been absolutely marvellous, doing all sorts of things that I don't understand, with computers and websites and Facebook and all the rest. Very different from when we started. But no, it's a good friendly bunch. And even now it's got far more geared to professional ecologists, it's still got some of that good humour about it, which is great because they're, I mean, they're competitors, strictly speaking but they seem to get on okay.

[31:58]

Engaging the Next Generation

Steve Roe

[31:58]And what sort of things can we do to attract the next generation to keep bat conservation going in the future?

Edward Wells

[32:04]Well, over the years I've done vast numbers of talks on bats, mostly to the elderly because it's that kind of population down here, but also to youngsters. I particularly like doing beaver packs are great for bats because they don't let you get away with anything. They ask you searching questions i will not let go until you've given them a decent answer which is great but um yeah i mean i remember a bat walk one of many we did in taunton where we handed out bat detectives to all the youngsters these school-aged kids walked along the edge of the river town and they were getting bored they'd stopped turning the light on the magenta's on because I told them it ran the battery down. And then you got your first bat. And you hear this sort of clicking all the way down a row of bat detectors one after the other. And from that point on, they are electrified by it. The difficulty the parents had was actually getting them home and going. They wanted to stay there all night. And if you can catch that generation that way, you don't have to work hard on it. The bats do it for you. But that is where the future is.

Steve Roe

[33:26]Brilliant. Edward Wells, thank you very much.

Edward Wells

[33:28]Not at all.

Steve Roe

[33:31]Thanks again to Edward Wells from Somerset Bat Group. And if you're new to the podcast and want to hear more from this bat group, there are links to a couple of previous episodes we've recorded with them in the show notes. I'll be back on New Year's Eve to keep you going through the festive season at a location in Lincolnshire, which has taken to looking after its bat roost in its stride. I think having Prince Charles come in 2018, he came to Lincolnshire that day. And one of the main reasons he wanted to come to this church was to see how we look after the bats.