From Aberdeen to Madagascar with Paul Racey

In this episode, we chat with Emeritus Professor Paul Racey, one of the best-known figures in bat ecology and conservation. Paul talks about how his interest in bats began when he was at school, watching dusk fall and becoming curious about the animals that emerge after dark. He shares how early teachers, university life, and time in the field helped shape what became a lifelong career.

We look back over Paul’s many years of work, including his role in helping to establish the Bat Conservation Trust. He reflects on how bat conservation has changed, why public interest and understanding really matter, and the moments that shifted the field forward—particularly the arrival of full-spectrum bat detectors.

Paul also discusses some of his key research, from discoveries about bat breeding to the work of his students, and why mentoring the next generation has always been so important to him. The conversation touches on his work afield too, covering his research in Madagascar, where working closely with local scientists led to the discovery of a new bat species Pipistrellus raceyi.

Listen to our episode with Sue Swift here.

Listen to our episode with Jon Russ here.

Take a look at Pipistrellus raceyi.

Leaving a review helps other listeners find the show more easily and spread the good word about bats. Don't know how to leave a comment? Check out our simple instructions here.

Chapters

• 0:26 Bat Adventures Begin
• 3:17 Magical Bat Encounters
• 4:25 Meet Professor Paul Racey
• 9:43 Early Inspirations in Bat Research
• 14:07 A Career in Academia
• 17:07 Notable Students and Their Journeys
• 25:08 Research Innovations and Challenges
• 34:18 The Birth of Bat Conservation Trust
• 42:37 The Future of Bat Conservation
• 43:49 A Message to Bat Advocates

Transcript

Steve Roe:
[0:04] Tomorrow morning I'm interviewing Emeritus Professor Paul Racey, but because he lives in the deepest, darkest southwest, I've come down the night before, and I'm visiting one of my old haunting grounds from many years ago, a greater horseshoe roost that's in a sea cave.

Steve Roe:
[0:26] The sea cave is inaccessible. I'm going to position myself against this bit of dry stone wall and count the bouts as they commute down the side of the wall.

Steve Roe:
[1:02] So i'm now tucked up against the dry stone wall it's about 15 minutes after sunset my good friend helen ball who's been on the podcast a couple of times in earlier series she first told me about this roost and i first came here over 20 years ago with mum and dad whilst on holiday in the southwest and over 20 years later i'm still here with the same bat box three bat detector And I'm just watching the far drystone wall next to the south west coast path, waiting for the greater horseshoes to fly up the cliff face, over the drystone wall and into the sheltered field I'm in now, and to fly along the wall down towards me. And with it being later summer, the grasshoppers and crickets are really kicking off. It's a breezy night but it's warm because it's overcast and the setting sun to my left is casting a faint orange glow in the sky. Here we go.

Steve Roe:
[2:12] There's one, there's two.

Steve Roe:
[3:17] I've got to see some really special bat roosts over the last 25 years, but this has still got to be my absolute favourite. Being tucked up against the wall, low in the grass field. The bats don't realise you're there until they're right in front of you. And to be able to feel the wind from their wings. It's just magical. I'm guessing there's around 60 bats emerged. Right, after a five hour drive and another hour still to go tomorrow, it's definitely time for bed.

Steve Roe:
[4:26] Paul Racey is a leading authority on bats. His infectious passion for these mammals have inspired many bat ecologists over the years. Paul was one of the founders of the Bat Conservation Trust and served as its first chair for six years. He even has a species of bat named after him, as we'll hear in this episode of BatChat. I mean I'm sure lots of listeners have heard your name. Just tell listeners of where it all began for you. What got you hooked on bats originally all those years ago?

Paul Racey:
[5:02] I suppose it was as a schoolboy that my favorite time of the day was dusk when one group of animals disappeared and very soon another group of animals came out flitting around the skies and I wanted to know more about this second group that came out at dusk and were flying around doing stall turns and that sort of thing. So that was the kindling of it. And then three things happened when I went away to college. The first was that every week we had three subjects and every week we got an essay in each of those subjects set by a tutor. And one week our zoology tutor said, I'm not going to give your subject this week, go to the old exam papers and choose one yourself, which I did. And I chose write an essay on echolocation in bats, about which I knew nothing. So I went to the library and found a book written by Donald Griffin.

Paul Racey:
[6:02] Who is sort of one of the rediscoverers of echolocation. He was an American behaviorist, and it was originally in the 1700s, Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian scientist, thought he'd discovered echolocation in bats with experiments we would consider to be awful today. So he put pitch in the ears of bats and found that they bumped into things, but when he put a little tube in the middle of the pitch to leave the ear passage patent, and they didn't bump into things. So that was the start of it. But Griffin came along in the 1930s and proved it. And he wrote this book, and I read the book, wrote the essay, and that was the sort of start of it. I knew a bit about it by that time.

Paul Racey:
[6:53] And the second was the Cambridge Natural History Society had very good talks, and they invited Lord Jock Cranbrook to come up and give a talk, which he did. And at the end of the talk, he said, any of you chaps interested in bats, give me a ring and come and I'll show you some. So I had a friend in the group we talked and we said well let's phone him up so I did that and Jock was one of those late Victorian gentlemen who hated the telephone so he said yes come weekend wear jeans bye and so my friend had a Riley car hidden up.

Paul Racey:
[7:41] In the outer suburbs of Cambridge because undergraduates weren't allowed to have cars, nor were they allowed to move more than three miles from Great St. Mary's Church, the university church, without the written permission of their tutor. So illegally we trooped off to Great Glemham, where the Cranbrooks were very hospitable, and Jock drove us round in his Land Rover around airfields, just used airfields at night. And he had one of the new Holgate back detectors. And so we were listening to Noctules. That was our first sort of introduction to fieldwork, if you like.

Paul Racey:
[8:22] Then later that summer, I'd enrolled in a field course in Flatford Mill in nearby Essex. And one of the excursions for that field course was to go out with jock cranbrook and his colleague and net noctuals over a rubbish tip so there was a rubbish tip that noctuals came to and you had to get there early get your nets up catch your noctuals before the pipistrols arrived because pipistrols were much more difficult to get out of mist nets very fiddly so we got our noctuals and we took them back to the kitchen of Great Glenmum House, where they were weighed and measured and fussed over and released from the porch. And that was my first bit of bat processing. And then the third thing was Andrew Watson, who was an amateur batman, was in charge of the Mammal Society Bat Group.

Paul Racey:
[9:21] And I was a member of the Mammal Society, got in touch with him, and he said he'd lend me a Holgate's bat detector, the first one, for a few weeks. So I went down to Beijing Tote and collected it and just wandered around in the evenings pointing this bat detector at the sky and listening to these sounds and I had no idea what I was listening to really.

Paul Racey:
[9:43] That was to come later. So they were the three things that really got me going, but I left Cambridge with not a particularly good degree and I got a very interesting job at Rothamsted.

Paul Racey:
[9:59] Experimental station working in the bee department and they said and one of the reasons I was keen to go there they said I could do a PhD well when I got there it turned out that was true I could have got a PhD but it would have taken about 10 years which was a bit long so I worked on the the role of wild bees in pollinating fruit and seed crops, which was interesting in itself. But then a job came up at London Zoo in one of the research institutes to work on bats. And I applied for that. I was interviewed. And because I'd been out with Andrew Watson, Andrew would take me to some bat roosts. So I knew some bat roosts. I knew a bit about bats. I could talk a bit of bat talk, and I convinced them that I could go out and catch bats in the wild because I'd done some netting and whatnot. And that fulfilled their criteria for someone who could go out and catch bats and bring them into captivity.

Paul Racey:
[11:01] Research their reproductive biology. But most of the interview was spent with the chairman of the interviewing committee, who was Professor Sir Alan Parks, who was a very keen beekeeper. He just wanted to talk about bees. And the other two suits on the interviewing committee were most discomforted by this. I got on fine with Parks talking about bees. So that was good. So I got a job as a research assistant in the Wellcome Institute of Comparative Physiology and that's where I did most of the work for my PhD.

Steve Roe:
[11:35] You say you wandered around with the Holgate-Bat-Statter, they weren't small things were they?

Paul Racey:
[11:39] You're dead right, they were absolutely the size of a shoebox and you had to put new batteries in and they were the big U2 cells and when you opened them up the box was full of air, there was so much space in it and I remember asking David Pye, or whoever developed the actual box, why they were so big. They said, oh, the company just got a good deal on these metal boxes from the company that made them. So that's why they ended up so big. And of course, these days, they're all so small you can slip into your pocket.

Steve Roe:
[12:18] And then what was it that took you to Aberdeen back in 73?

Paul Racey:
[12:22] Well, after I'd done my PhD, I was offered a postdoc in the unit of reproductive biology in Liverpool for a couple of years. And I knew, I mean, I was married with a child and I knew I had to get a job. And I liked the idea of academia. And there were two vacant jobs advertised in nature, lectureships in zoology. One was at Hull and the other was in Aberdeen. And I knew Hull was, of course, closer to home. I come from East Anglia. My wife comes from East Anglia. I knew if I'd applied for the job in Hull and didn't give my current boss as a referee, the boss of the place I was applying to would be straight on the phone to my current boss and say, why is that? Have you fallen out with him or something? which I had.

Paul Racey:
[13:14] So I didn't apply there. I applied to Aberdeen, where no one would be known. And I had three referees and did not include my boss, and none of them welched on me. And I got a lectureship in Aberdeen. And it was the end of, I mean, after the post-war baby boom, there was a huge expansion of university real estate and university student numbers and therefore university staff to teach them and nature produced a graph which was a big blip and it was just coming down and I think I got in just at the end you know as that graph petered out and there was no more recruitment to lectureships for a long time.

Paul Racey:
[14:07] Anyway we moved to Aberdeen so it was a culture shock particularly for my wife but we were very lucky in that we were given a rented university house because she was again pregnant and the university owned most of the real estate in Old Aberdeen, historically. But the problem was that university housing was in areas with what was then described as poor schooling. So there was a high turnover. So there was an incentive to move out.

Paul Racey:
[14:44] Somewhere else and there was a huge choice of semi-derelict cottages and cross in the countryside and we ended up in one of those for 36 years. So it was a long time and I was very happy there and they were very supportive of my interests and I'm very grateful to have spent that time there.

Steve Roe:
[15:09] And over those 36 years you've had some fantastic students.

Paul Racey:
[15:13] Well, let's talk with Mark Avery first, because he was the first. I had a NERC studentship, so I had a studentship to give away. And Mark was one of the applicants, and he was pretty equivocal, because he really wanted to work on birds, and he'd been doing some work on bee-eaters at Tour de Valais in the Camargue. But, you know, I persuaded him to think of these things as birds of the night and whatnot. Anyway he did it and he didn't drive and i said how are you going to do a phd on the winter activity of bats in east anglia which we found a alternative base for him in the department of applied biology in cambridge and i said how do you think you're going to do that he said i'm going to use a bicycle and pay trains i said oh yeah fine good luck young man and uh well very Very soon he got a driving license in the car. And he did a very interesting PhD on the winter activity of bats that showed.

Paul Racey:
[16:21] You know, the received wisdom that bats went into hibernation at the beginning of winter and came out of hibernation at the end of winter, no such thing. Mark found that bats were active over the three-year period in every winter month and on a third of all winter nights. So that meant that they had to get up to urinate, find some water or whatever. But Mark fitted into the PhD very well because it was a winter PhD which was rare in bats and he could go off to the Tour de Valais in the summer and work on his bee eaters which he did and of course he went on to have an illustrious career in the Royal

Paul Racey:
[17:06] Society of Protection of Birds.

Steve Roe:
[17:08] Bats clearly still hold an important place in his heart because his latest book Reflections, has a picture of the baton on the front of it as well, so.

Paul Racey:
[17:16] Yes, yes. He's been down here since I retired and spent a night with us, so he's great to talk to. And I value his contribution to Wild Justice, because he was one of the first three, directors of wild justice who are unafraid to take on the government and you know have judicial reviews and take the government to court and i think that's fantastic and i regret the fact that he feels that after three years or however long it was he's he's you know he served his stint and someone else has taken over now but that's really great hopefully.

Steve Roe:
[17:57] There's something else good in the pipeline with

Paul Racey:
[17:58] Him yeah and.

Steve Roe:
[17:59] Then sue swift you know people will know the name because she's got the famous monograph from the Poiser series. Just tell us a bit about Sue then.

Paul Racey:
[18:08] Yes, Sue was brought up in what was then Rhodesia. I think her parents sent her initially to Vatishrand University in South Africa, which you can imagine was male-dominated and didn't suit her at all. So she came to the uk her mother i think her mother had a legacy light in edinburgh bank had paid for her education in aberdeen and i mean she was just a very hard-working very keen student, and when it came to the final honors year where they all do an honors project She wanted to do one on bats, we organised one, and she wrote it up and it was a very good idea. Eventually, after the honours year, it was sent off for publication. So I think she was the first of my honours students who had some of their own original research published. So then I got another NERC studentship. You applied freely for NERC studentships, a competitive application. And I wanted to give it to Sue.

Paul Racey:
[19:28] And the Natural Environmental Research Council, who funded it, said no why she's Rhodesian she's subject to sanctions and we were all incensed and my professors were incensed and they were not they were powerful men and they went down to NERC and they beat the table and they got absolutely nowhere and that shows you know the extent the extent of what that government was doing with sanctions. Anyway, so Sue was in limbo, if you like. So I thought of an alternative. I would apply personally to the National Environmental Council for a three-year research grant to cover the same sort of things, which I did and I got. And I could appoint Sue Swift as research assistant. And that wasn't sanctions because it didn't apply. So she became, if you like, a research assistant. The rules were that you could register an employee, a research assistant, part-time for a PhD. So that's what we did. So that's how we got round it.

Paul Racey:
[20:47] Looking back on it, it was quite ingenious, but it seemed the most natural thing to do at the time. And Sue did that, and we got plenty of publications out of that. And then she stayed on, and she did some editing and some ad hoc research as it came up, and particularly on remedial timber treatments, because the timber treatment industry was using high concentrations of chlorinated hydrocarbons in roof spaces to kill insects and wood-boring fungi, far higher than they needed to use but they needed to give 20-year guarantees so the householder could take those guarantees to a building society and get a mortgage and what the bats who had left these summer roosts for the winter came back in the spring went up into the roof spaces jostled against the roost timbers groomed themselves and then died of chlorinated hydrocarbon poisoning.

Paul Racey:
[21:53] So we thought there was another way around this. So at that time, Tam Diel, MP, who was father of the House, became interested in this issue. He was briefed by Bob Stebbings and also by me. And he got up and made a speech about these timber treatment companies killing bats. And I got hold of the relevant Hansard and repeated the bit about timber treatment companies to Rentakill, who immediately sent a director up on the aeroplane. And I had suggested in my letter to Rentakill that I'd like to work with them to explore the use of alternative chemicals. And we had a candidate list, pyrethroids particularly. He came huffing and puffing up to Aberdeen on the aeroplane. And the only thing he wanted to know from me was this reference that tamdl made to timber treatment companies was that his company rentakill i said i don't know it probably was and off he went and he wrote back and he said i couldn't possibly commit my company to the level of expenditure that you suggest six thousand pounds okay another route so we went to vincent weir very keen on bats and he gave us the money and we did the experiments.

Paul Racey:
[23:19] Some of which we didn't like doing, but they showed that if you put bats in a cage lined with pyrethroids.

Paul Racey:
[23:27] They survived. And so we published all that, but the timber treatment companies would not accept it because they said, ah, yes, artificial, you see, you didn't allow the bats to go out and fly each night. We couldn't have done that. We didn't have the facilities. So the whole thing had to be repeated again in a government contract costing 10 times the amount.

Paul Racey:
[23:55] Ours cost 6,000 pounds, Vincent Ware provided. I think theirs cost at least $60,000. And it was run by a former honor student of mine, Ian Boyd, who worked for NERC at the time, and carried out at Monkswood Experimental Station, where they had little cages in, and they built huge aviaries so the bats could fly at night. And they turned up exactly the same result. And in the end, the timber treatment companies, for whatever reason, abandoned their use of chlorinated hydrocarbons. I've never claimed the credit for that because it all came about as a number of things. There was our study, there was the study by Boyd and Myhill, and there was the fact that a rent-a-kill operative had sued the company for some condition he'd contracted that he thought was caused by chlorinated hydrocarbons.

Paul Racey:
[24:54] So whichever way, you could then go to a DIY shop and buy timber treatments without chlorinated hydrocarbons and bat-friendly.

Paul Racey:
[25:05] And I think that remains the case to this day, luckily. And so Sue carried on doing bat work. She got married and moved to Glensheed. And she built a bat facility in a cottage next to her house. And she could do behavioural experiments, particularly with Natteras bats.

Paul Racey:
[25:30] She collaborated with the Lake Beyond Seamers and showed that Natteras listen.

Paul Racey:
[25:36] To their prey, and they can pick up very tiny noises, stuff like that. And she carried that on for a long time and worked very enthusiastically with the local bat group, doing surveys for Nature Scotland or whoever.

Steve Roe:
[25:53] And then John Russ, I mean, every ecologist in the country has got a copy of John's echolocation books on his shelf. And we've had John on the podcast. And he remembers that he wasn't actually going to study bats. He was going to do a study on Orkney Bowls until he came to speak to you.

Paul Racey:
[26:06] I'd forgotten that. The thing I remember about John Russ, which impressed me hugely, was that when I first met him, as a young undergraduate just coming to Aberdeen, he'd driven to Aberdeen from his home in the south of England, I don't know, Slough or somewhere like that. He'd driven up to Aberdeen on his motorcycle. And as a former motorcyclist myself, I thought that was a formidable feat. No he he worked on i think he did his honors project with me he didn't do his phd with me he did that in northern ireland probably because you know i didn't have a studentship at the time but he was he was an excellent student and quite innovative particularly on the sort of echolocation front i mean he had a fairly hairy phd because he was doing it in northern ireland and that involved going out with this equipment at night during the troubles. You know, he needed a steely nerve and a good cover story. But no, he's achieved a great deal, particularly with that latest book. I think it's fantastic.

Steve Roe:
[27:17] And what's been your favorite published paper? I mean, there's been so many, but are there any that stand out?

Paul Racey:
[27:22] I'll pick out two. I think the paper that described it was a symposium paper. That described the fact that female pipistrels can slow down, stop, or speed up their rate of gestation, which is unique among mammals. Because we spent a long time looking to see whether any other mammals could do it, and we couldn't find one. And that was unique. Why do they do it? I think it's a feature of the very slow rate of fetal growth anyway. So bat babies are grown very slowly, the same slow rate as cetacean babies, and it's much slower than the majority of mammals. And I think because it's so slow, they are unable to moderate it faster, slower, stop. And we showed, and subsequent paper with Sue Swift showed, that they can stop it for 10 days. So they get pregnant in April, May. And in Scotland, you've got some filthy weather, late May, June, you know, sleet, snow, no insects flying. They just wouldn't come out of the roosts and they would stop developing their babies and then when the weather got better things just carried on as before.

Paul Racey:
[28:48] And then the second paper was the one with Kate Barlow called Carpe Diem. And there was a group of us. Kate was the lead author.

Paul Racey:
[29:01] And it was a review of several features of bat biology that were high on the agenda. And Carpe Diem, as you know, means seize the day. and they were, if you like, the urgent back priorities for the moment. And that's very well cited. So there too, but there were many.

Steve Roe:
[29:25] And listeners might not realise that for 16 years you were the Regis Professor of Natural History, which is an honorific appointment. And there's only ever one of those at any one time, is that right?

Paul Racey:
[29:36] Correct, yes, yes. I mean, I was originally appointed Professor of Zoology And then some years later, that was moved to Regis Professor of Natural History. And that stems from the fact that I think it was James IV of Scotland who invented the title and first appointed the first Regis Professor. And what it meant was that the king made the appointment, or the monarch made the appointment, and paid the salary. And that was the case for a while, but that's no longer the case, but it is the case that the appointment was in my case and may still be in the ultimate hands of the legislature. So the university is required to send a couple of names into parliament or the Scottish office in my case, and they're meant to decide, Well, there was a bit of a standoff between our universities and the Scottish universities at the time. And I'm not quite sure how it was resolved, but I was appointed Regis Professor.

Paul Racey:
[30:51] And I've got a parchment hanging on the stairs signed by George Lang, who was Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Scotland, and signed at the top by Elizabeth R, telling me that I am her trusty and well-beloved, which means a lot to me.

Steve Roe:
[31:08] Absolutely fantastic. and then just touch I mean there's been so much work in Madagascar and I can see on the shelf behind you you've got two very large books about Madagascar but just tell us a little bit about the work there and the Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship that you've got as well oh

Paul Racey:
[31:25] Yeah I I had an honours student Martin Nicol who went to work in the Seychelles on Tenrecs, and he met another honest student from Royal Holloway who said he wanted to go to Madagascar to work on TENREX where there was a much bigger, more diverse population. And Martin Nichol, who was the student in the Seychelles, said, well, why don't you go and talk to RACI in Aberdeen and he might be interested. So that's what happened. And P.J. Stevenson, Peter Stevenson, He got a NERC scholarship, in his own right, to go to Madagascar to work on ten wrecks. I went out to see him, I always went out to see students in the field for a period. And that was the start of having a series of students in Madagascar. So I think, you know, I've worked in lots of African and Asian countries. I've been to every country in Southeast Asia except Laos. But no doubt that Madagascar is my favourite.

Steve Roe:
[32:42] You've got a species of bat named after you called Pipistrellis racii or Races pipistrell. It's been found in four locations in Madagascar, is that right?

Paul Racey:
[32:50] Well if you tell me that Steve yes but I was sitting we went mist netting one night in the west of Madagascar in Kirindi and I was with another student sitting by a pond, with nets set up always a good place to catch bats anywhere with a pond and as we were sitting there, on one side of the pond, a fossa walked by on the other side of the pond, which was, you know, a rare sighting. And that was terrific. And we caught one bat. And after extricating it from the net, we took it back. And it was turned out to be a bat not hitherto seen, but which Paul Bates later named Pippistrellus racii. Not, I have to say, based on that bat, because by the time the bat that we actually got to Paul Bates, I don't know whose hands it had been through, but it was a bit bashed up to become a type specimen. So it was another one of the four you mentioned that must have become the type specimen. Yeah, so that was a great honor. And I think they said that you know we're naming this bat in honour of Paul Racey who's about to retire.

Paul Racey:
[34:15] Racey wasn't about to retire he's still doing a bit.

Steve Roe:
[34:19] And then just moving away from academia for a moment you were the Bat Conservation Trust's first chair for about six years. Just tell us about we've I mean we've had Bob Stebbings on and we spoke to Tony Hudson before he passed away. But just tell us your account of how BCT came to be all those years ago.

Paul Racey:
[34:36] Oh, well, what? In two minutes. It was quite a saga. I mentioned my first involvement was the Mammal Society bat group. And then in the wake of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, other interest groups, bat interest groups, were set up, often on a county basis. They needed training and support, training, physical training in how to survey bats and also propaganda, if you like, in the form of leaflets and information leaflets and stuff like that about bats.

Paul Racey:
[35:17] So the number of these bats grew quite exponentially, up to 40 very quickly. And it was decided that there needed to be a body to oversee all this activity.

Paul Racey:
[35:35] And that was established as Bat Groups of Britain, funded, I think, by a consortium of the Vincent Wildlife Trust, the world wildlife fund whatever the forerunner was english nature i think i've got that right there were a number of them formed a consortium and vincent weir i mean it was decided they needed like quarterly meetings and vincent weir offered them the premises in baltic exchange buildings, in the city and lots of people came not least because he offered a very nice lunch and uh so that that's how it and vincent asked me to chair the meetings because they'd been shared by different people and that wasn't a good recipe you needed some continuity so vincent asked me to chair them there were two bat officers at the time tony hudson and george bennett bement and they were working out of the fauna and fauna preservation society's office in camden town but um then fauna and fauna changed chairs and migrated to surrey or sussex sussex probably with the new chair, John Gooders.

Paul Racey:
[37:05] So that Vincent stepped in and took the two bat officers, Tony Hudson and George Berman into his office in Baltic Exchange Buildings. Gradually, because of financial constraints at the time, the funders reduced their fundings and began to pull out. I mean, WWF had always said their funding was going to be finite. So they pulled out, English Nature was getting under financial constraints. And so it was left basically Vincent holding the fort. Eventually, I mean, things came to a head because George Bement left to join her husband in Payton Zoo. And Tony arrived home one day and found his P40 on his doorstep. And then John Burton, who had been at one point Executive Secretary of 404 Preservation Society, he always kept an eye on what was going on on the big picture.

Paul Racey:
[38:09] And he convened a meeting in the Geological Museum of the Natural History Museum, in the Geological Museum there. And there were half a dozen of us of me, Phil Richardson, who ran the Batalog, that was a sales operation, Henry Arnold, Bob Stebbings, I think Bob was there. And he said look we can't go on like this relying on vincent who was changed his mind from one day to the next we've got to go it alone and uh everybody said yeah okay and two of them were told off to go and write a constitution others were i i said because vincent had put so much into about stuff that i think we had an obligation to be honest with him and tell him what we were doing and they said well you got yourself a job racy so i did that and i didn't tell you the reaction i got was volcanic because vincent vincent had an idea simplistic idea of a unified conservation society that would do everything plants animals reptiles amphibians mammals.

Paul Racey:
[39:30] Everything and it was really pie in the sky it was not how things worked so i had to tell vincent he was not at all happy and in fact he was not supportive of what we were trying to do initially he was later. And so WWF offered us a startup grant, three years tapered. That enabled us to hire an office in the London Ecology Centre in Covent Garden. At that point, someone donated £25,000.

Paul Racey:
[40:03] We have no idea to this day who that was. There's a bit of guessing, but no names. We just don't know. But that was hugely important.

Paul Racey:
[40:15] And that office serviced the back groups, as had been done before, leaflets and advice and quarterly meetings were held there. There was a big meeting room upstairs, although we couldn't provide the same lunch as Winston so it was went from there and because we had stability we could plan our own projects and the first project we planned was Bats in Churches and a young lady called Jilly Sargent who'd done her honest project on bats anyway she was appointed to it and she ran the bats in churches project which in one form or another still goes on you know and then the survey work started to take shape structured bat surveys and then eventually and I can't remember what what stimulated it I mean we were soon outgrowing this little office in Covent Garden and we were offered by John Beddington an office in a disused converted convent in Battersea and they moved there and eventually were able to take on chief executive and so on.

Steve Roe:
[41:38] So in the 50 plus years since you started working with bats there's been in several new research techniques. So DNA testing has become more affordable. We've now got full spectrum bat detectors, radio tags. If you could have just one of today's techniques back then, which one would you choose?

Paul Racey:
[41:57] I think full spectrum bat detectors.

Steve Roe:
[41:59] Yeah.

Paul Racey:
[42:00] Because that would have been, you know, that could have done so much in so many places at that time. DNA was coming. But DNA has certainly made huge advances and revolutionized a few things, but not, and some people might not like me saying this, like the taxonomists and systematists, but I don't think it's had such a broad impact as the global surveying that sophisticated back detectors have allowed.

Steve Roe:
[42:38] What can we do to attract the next generation to keep bat conservation going into the future?

Paul Racey:
[42:45] Maintain the network of bat groups. I mean, speaking for the UK, maintain the network of bat groups and concentrate on the things that bat groups do very well and the public like best. And if I could single out one of those things, it's bat walks. During the summer, I did one at a caravan park and I was amazed at how enthused they all were. So that's one thing for the next generation. Bat Conservation Trust puts out the junior bat newsletter. They'll know the impact of that. I don't know. But I think bat walks would be the thing that I would focus on. And they're also quite good at people like Chris Packham and his producers manage to get in bits about bats on their their watches and i think that's good there's always one slot smaller or larger on bats and i think that's very good because it it's not david attenborough style it's the here and now,

Paul Racey:
[43:46] present style and i think that's really good and.

Steve Roe:
[43:50] Then finally what message would you give to everyone who's listening to this now who's involved in bat conservation

Paul Racey:
[43:55] Find out more about bats and learn to love them like I have.

Steve Roe:
[44:01] Fantastic. Professor Paul Racey, thank you very much.

Paul Racey:
[44:05] You're welcome.

Steve Roe:
[44:08] A huge thanks to Paul for sitting down with me to give that interview. There's more of that interview we couldn't quite squeeze into this episode, but keep your eyes out as it may appear as a bonus episode in the future. In the show notes, you'll find links to previous episodes with Sue Swift and John Russ, both of whom were mentioned by Paul there, along with a link to a photo of Pipistrellis racii. Next time, we'll be visiting a country park in a South Wales beauty spot, which has become one of the best sites for bats in the UK. The park is 850 hectares of Deer Park. You've got multiple habitats, lots of standing deadwood. So I think just in terms of habitat and also having this casket, it's a really good sort of mix. And because the castle is open and isn't fully used by the public, it's just created the perfect sort of roost space habitats for the bats to thrive in.