Tell us about your bat sightings!

If you’ve seen bats, we’d like to know about it. One of the simplest ways you can help the London Bat Group is to let us know if you’ve seen bats. We’re especially interested in sightings that indicate the presence of a roost such as bat swarming at dawn.

Your information will help us:

• Identify the location of roosts and important sites
• Prove presence of bats when important sites are threatened
• Monitor populations

Our database holds over 27,000 records from 1985 to present day however like many recording schemes, a few recorders supply most of the records. For all the records in our database 64% were in fact collected by seven recorders! We are grateful for every single record so please consider sending your records in. Below are some guidelines on what we would like to receive.

What?  Species (essential but could be simply bat or suspected Daubenton’s).

Where?  Where in London did you see the bat(s)? A location ideally accompanied with a six figure grid reference (eg TQ123456) but we will accept more or less precision. A useful website for getting grid references can be found here.

When?  Date (essential but can be incomplete e.g. May 2012).

Details?  Very useful but not essential. How many bats did you see (e.g. 5 feeding, 23 passes). How the bats were behaving (e.g. in flight, on a wall, whether the bat was flying high above trees, or across the surface of a lake). Do you see them every year? Did you see them leaving a tree or a building?

Ideally your records would be in electronic format preferably using our template spreadsheet, with the above information as different fields, but we will accept other formats and also paper records.

The template spreadsheet has a sample tab as an example of how to fill in the spreadsheet, please fill in the roost and/or flying bat tabs with your record(s). If you don’t have Microsoft Office, don’t worry the spreadsheet can also be opened in Open Office!

Please send the completed spreadsheet to records@londonbats.org.uk.

If you wish to contact us for a records search please see our Records Search page.