There are some truly fantastic voyagers in nature. Cuckoos fly from Northern Europe to central Africa every year. Letherback’s turtle can migrate thousands of miles from their first breeding colony. However, this doesn’t lessen the joy of many conservationists, when they found out that a thumb-sized bat might have crossed the North Sea.
The hero of the journey is a male Nathusius’s pipistrelle, that weights only 7.6 grams. It was tagged with a miniature metal ring in its birth place at Blagdon Lake in South-West UK in October 2012. The animal is too small to carry a satellite tracker, so research on the migration of this species is limited. It was a great surprise to Daniel Hargreaves of he Bat Conservation Trust, who had put the ring on the said bat, when the lifeless body of this creature was discovered in a farmyard shed in the village called Pietersbierum, on the North coast of the Netherlands.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
Nathusius’s pipistrelle can cover impressive distances, sometimes even 50 miles in one night, and occasionally they cross more than thousand miles over time. Most of these journeys are on land. Until now there were no records of any of them crossing the sea. The bat A4030, that was the number on his ring, might prove that they can migrate between UK and mainland Europe. The current hypothesis is that this little fellow has spent the autumn and winter close to Blagdon hibernating and possibly mating, and migrated to the Northern Netherlands in the summer.
There have been several recordings of some Nathusius’s pipistrelle reaching North Sea oil platforms, that suggested that these bats migrate, but this is the first time when a single bat has crosses a distance of over 370 miles, from which most were over the sea. For such a small creature as Nathusius’s pipistrelle to cover so great distance over sea, it would have needed the right weather conditions, including wind blowing from behind. Nathusius pipistrelle is at risk from wind turbines in Europe, so the little animal must have successfully avoided them. In case more bats choose to migrate to the continental Europe, their migration routes should be identified because offshore wind-farms in the wrong place can turn out to be fatal. Scientists have already installed bat detectors on Brittany ferries that are going to and from South-West England.
Nathusius’s Pipistrelle Range
Image from Wikimedia Commons
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