Richard Bell's Wild West Yorkshire nature diary

Bat Night

Tuesday, 10th April, 2007
Richard Humphris RICHARD HUMPHRIS gave an entertaining talk on British Bats tonight at the Wakefield Naturalists Society. I sketched as he went through his slides.

Bats are fully protected in Britain. Richard told a story of a school who contacted Natural England and, against their advice, said, bats or no bats, with just six weeks to go until the new term they were going to go ahead and put a new roof on the school hall. With the maximum fine for causing reckless disturbance resulting in the death of a bat running at just £5,000 why should they worry?

In the investigation that followed the new roof was stripped back revealing that 70 bats had been trapped and died a lingering death. But the fine, is in fact £5,000 per bat, so the school (or contractors, I don’t know the details of this story) were fined £350,000! Yay!

Doesn’t bring the bats back of course.

Extinguishers

I spent a little time in a waiting room this morning. Long enough to draw the fire extinguisher with a fibre tip pen - a Q Connect fineliner O.4 (left).

I drew the same fire extinguisher on a previous occasion (right), by the looks of it that time I used a Parker fountain pen.