The French word for a bat is chauve-souris, meaning a bald mouse. Bats, however, aren't bald. And they're not mice but mammals in the order Chiroptera.

There is great excitement in our house this week. We discovered that the colony of bats which always roosts in the open timbers above the kiln room had moved outside to a beam above the showroom window. We had very hot weather and Hugh was firing; they must have been frightened by the increased heat.  Who would have guessed that about 46 females and 26 babies were hanging there?

A layer of droppings on the wide window sill gave away their presence and we also noticed a lot of woodworm dust. Bats are protected by law in France. They may not be destroyed, kept or moved. We needed to treat the woodworm in the beam but this would have killed the bats so we rang Bourges's Natural History Museum for advice.

Curators from the Museum came to see our bats a couple of days later and we visited them the same week. Laurent Arthur is the enthusiastic expert who showed us the bats he is caring for in his dimly lit office/bat room. He showed us an orphan Serotine, weighing only 10g, which lives under his collar and which he frequently feeds with flour maggots - big ones - which look like baby's bottles when the little bat sucks on them.

He is trying to save the life of a Common Pipistrelle whose wings were accidentally damaged with silicone glue by a house owner who thought that his bats had moved to another roost. Laurent Arthur has cleaned it's fur as best he can and is keeping it alive with special milk from a dropper.

A Common Serotine has lived in the Museum for 5 years. It was born with a short wing and will never fly. It lives in a box and seems quite content with its solitary life, as certain male bats often are.

We borrowed a device for detecting the frequency of their calls. Ours registered 37-40 which indicates that they may be Kuhl's Pipistrelles, a species normally found only in the very south of France (or further south outside Europe). Students from the Museum have been here at night with specialised equipment and we are waiting to hear whether our colony is only the third one known in the Cher Department!

UPDATE:  Very sadly, we heard from Laurent this afternoon that his little orphan bat, the one in this picture above, has lost its struggle for life. It had not eaten for days and had to be put to sleep.

Click on the pics!