Listening to the dark, by Saffron Tilly

An original contemporary magazine column.

There are, I am told, better ways to spend a Friday night than standing in a Victorian cemetery in the rain, holding a box that clicks. At the time I could think of several. By the end of the evening, I could not imagine anything better.

The box was a bat detector. Bats hunt by sending out high-pitched calls and listening for the echoes, but almost all of those calls are too high for human ears. The detector lowers them into a range we can hear. Point it at the sky over an empty patch of grass and you get a faint hiss. Point it at the sky when a bat goes past and you get something else entirely.

I was there with the Ashgrove Bat Group, a dozen volunteers who meet once a month from April to October to count the bats of Ashgrove Cemetery, eight hectares of yews, ivy and crumbling angels in the middle of a city of half a million people. Their leader, a retired bus driver called Desmond Akers, has been doing this for nineteen years. He handed out the detectors at the gate like a priest giving out hymn books. ‘Don’t look for them,’ he said. ‘Listen for them. They’ll come to you.’

For twenty minutes, nothing. A fox trotted along the path, looked at us with mild contempt and carried on. The city hummed behind the walls: sirens, traffic, someone’s music drifting from a flat. I began, privately, to plan the column I would write about how nothing had happened.

Then my detector went off like a pan of popcorn. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, faster and faster, and then a sudden wet raspberry of a noise that made me laugh out loud. ‘Pipistrelle,’ said Desmond, without even looking up. ‘That buzz at the end? That’s a feeding buzz. She’s just caught a midge.’ I looked up and saw it, briefly, a scrap of darkness no bigger than my thumb, flickering between the yew trees like a shadow that had come loose.

After that, they were everywhere. Common pipistrelles, then soprano pipistrelles, which call at a slightly higher pitch and sound, Desmond says, ‘like a pipistrelle that’s been at the helium’. Then, over the pond by the old chapel, something new: a slow, deep, steady clop, clop, clop, like a horse walking down a lane. ‘Noctule,’ Desmond said, and for the first time all night his voice changed. ‘One of our biggest bats. Haven’t had one here for three years.’ Around me, a dozen grown adults made the noise people make at fireworks.

It is easy to forget that this is science. Every call is logged, timed and mapped. Ashgrove’s records go back nearly two decades and are shared with a national monitoring scheme, which uses volunteer data from hundreds of sites to track how bat populations are changing. Bats are a good sign of a healthy environment: where they thrive, so do insects, trees and water. In a city that is always looking for space to build, a long record of bats is also, Desmond notes, ‘a very good argument for leaving a place alone’.

We finished at half past eleven, soaked and cold. In the car park I realised I was still holding my detector up to the sky, out of habit, hoping for one last tick.

I have signed up for next month.

Surveying bats in Ashgrove Cemetery is described as an unexpectedly magical experience. How does the writer try to show this?

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