lesser horseshoe bat (credit: Stevie-B)
News that the Welsh Assembly Government has just spent £650,000 on a bridge for bats to cross the road clearly indicates that conservation groups claims that budget cuts will impact on wildlife conservation has no relation to what’s happening on the ground.
New bat bridge cost dwarfs dormice bridge cost.
This new £650,000 bridge dwarfs the previous £300,000 that was spent to help dormice to cross the road. Even as budget cuts start to bite and the government could not afford to build a bridge for old people and children to cross the road safely they could find the money required to help bats. I think that any claims by the wildlife and conservation groups that budget cuts are impacting on biodiversity can be firmly put to rest and ignored.
Helping bats but not people cross the Porthmadog bypass.
The bridge is being built across a bypass at Porthmadog in North Wales. It’s been built to help a population of 450 lesser horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus hipposideros) find their way back to their roost at a disused landfill site. The road also cuts across the path to a local park and despite a campaign from local parents for a bridge for people and children to cross safely to the park there was no money to be found.
The bridge is going to be approximately 6 feet wide so is clearly big enough for a footpath which will at least add value to the money spent. Sadly there’s no money to be found to put tarmac on the bridge but plenty of money available to plant the bridge with trees, bushes and plants.
Why not use lower cost rope and wire bridges?
Bat bridges are nothing new but the sheer scale of the cost of this one takes it to a totally new level. Why did they not follow the path of the Heads of the Valleys Road where rope and wire bridges were used to help bats fly above the traffic? If they had used the wire and rope method then it would have cost a few tens of thousands at the very most.
The big question is has nature conservation now left the practical task of conservation and moved into the field of status symbol? Do we have a competition among local authorities and national governments to see how much money they can spend on a project just to demonstrate how ‘green’ they are?
Bats worth their weight in gold – and more.
Presumably the 450 bats that the money has been spent on - on a weight for weight basis they more expensive than gold – are so rare that it justifies the new bridge. Well the International Union for Conservation for Nature (IUCN) has lesser horseshoe bats marked as vulnerable (with lesser concern) on the Red List.
In Wales the population of lesser horseshoe bats is around 26,000 – Wales is home to about half of the UK’s population of lesser horseshoe bats – and numbers in Wales are increasing on average by 6.5% a year.
There’s also the question of just how many bats would die as a result of the bypass and whether the bat population could replace the lost bats without threatening the population viability.
How cost effective are bat bridges?
A bypass at Groesion, in Gwynedd, that was opening in 2001 saw 64 recorded bat deaths up until 2010 – barely 7 deaths a year. Bat’s, like most wildlife, are amazingly adept at adapting to changing circumstances.
Protecting wildlife is important but there has to be a realistic cost assessment done to determine if the money is well spent and effective. Is £650,000 an effective use of funds in order to save a handful of bats each year which the population could replace with natural reproduction anyway.
External sites:
BBC Bat bridge video report.
Wales Online: Rare bats back from the brink.
Lesser horseshoe bats factfile.
NBN Gateway lesser horseshoe bats datasets and maps.
Incoming search terms:
- bat bridge head of valleys road
- lesser horseshoe bat
- rope above roads for bats
- wildlife protection budget
