BATMAN RETURNS; BATS are often still seen as the blood-sucking friends of Dracula but, as discovered, the reality surrounding the furry flying creatures could not be more different.

Byline: Sarah Welsh

IT'S official. Bat-watching is fast becoming one of Cardiff's more popular pastimes.

You might not imagine that a great way to spend an evening would be tracking the furry mammals across a city park as darkness sets in, but many in the Welsh capital would disagree with you.

Organised bat walks run by Cardiff County Council's Park Service have increased in popularity so much that those wishing to attend them now have to book well in advance.

There are 15 species of bats still living in Britain today, although numbers are at an all-time low and they were classed as an endangered species by the government as far back as the 1980s in the last Wildlife and Countryside Act.

One man who has had a lifelong love affair with bats is Cardiff Park's countryside warden Mike Wiley, 53, who runs the walks in the city with the help of voluntary warden Chris James.

He said: "Some people are still afraid of bats, but there is no reason to be.

"The beauty is obviously in the eye of the beholder and I think they're quite cute.

"There's the old wives' tales about them falling onto people's heads and getting tangled in their hair, but they're not true. For one thing, bats are very good fliers so they would never bump into you on purpose.

"The thing I like about bats is they have been around for 50 million years and have hardly evolved in that time at all. They're really quite intelligent creatures.

"Their numbers are really declining now and three years ago the mouse-eared bat became extinct in Britain.

"It is a very sad story, because apparently there was one male left for two years flying around looking fruitlessly for a mate, and when he died so did the species."

Mike says the bat walks, which he has been involved with for 10 years, started because of demand.

He said: "We run Watch Club, which is the junior wing of the National Wildlife Trust, and the children sometimes make bat boxes for the animals to roost in, and people started asking about the idea of bat walks.

"We always tell people we cannot guarantee they'll see a bat, but they never go away without spotting a few.

"We use bat detectors to track them. They use echolocation to catch their prey, emitting sounds constantly which enable them to build up a perfect picture of the prey.

"These come out as ultrasound, but the detectors convert the noises to a lower frequency which humans can hear.

"The first walk we ever did saw more than 100 people turn out, so after that we had to ask those taking part to book in advance."

Chris, who is the technical manager at Cardiff University's School of Biosciences, says bats have increased in popularity over the past 15 years.

He said: "I think there has always been a fascination with them linked to Dracula and the occult and now Harry Potter.

"There is that mystery associated with bats which people like.

"But bats are really useful creatures because they eat insects like moths and beetles, and the smallest British bat, the Pipistrelle, actually eats around 5,000 midges in just one night."

Chris says the number of species you will see in Britain is higher the further south you go, so while you might see all 15 in Dorset, there are only two or three in the Scottish Highlands because of the change in environment.

He said: "The numbers of bats have declined by 99 per cent in the last 100 years because of changes in agriculture and use of poisonous chemicals and pesticides.

"They are not strictly nocturnal, but cerpuscular, which means they like to go out at dusk and dawn because of the temperature at that time.

"We start the bat walks around dusk in the summer and would probably see a few tens of bats each time.

It's grown into a great family event over the years.

"Most people wouldn't know where to look to find them on their own, but of a summer evening there are many bats flying around every Cardiff suburb."

A bat-talion of facts

THINK bats are merely the stuff of bad vampire films?

There is a lot more to them than that.

The world's smallest mammal is the bumblebee bat from Thailand, which weighs less than a penny.

The common little brown bat from North America has a life span exceeding 32 years.

Mexican free-tailed bats can fly up to two miles high.

Fishing bats are so sophisticated in their methods of catching prey, they can detect the fin of a fish as fine as a human hair.

Red bats from North America can withstand temperatures as low as 23infinityF during winter hibernation.

Frog-eating bats identify edible frogs from the poisonous ones by listening to the mating calls of the males.

Tiny "woolly" bats from West Africa live in large spider's webs.

Bats are very important in agriculture for the pollination and seed dispersal of certain plants.

CAPTION(S):

BATS THE WAY TO DO IT Countryside warden Mike Wiley, Cardiiff's original bat man. PICTURE: Peter Bolter