Bats

Passed this building on the Horton Clockwise this morning, which I now learn to have once been part of Manor Hospital, once a certified institution for mental defectives, whatever one of those might have been. It has now been acquired by the Batwatch outfit (see http://www.batwatch.org.uk/) and serves as their flagship bat preserve for Surrey.

The idea is that this is a safe haven in which the bats can breed and from which they can fly out at night to establish new colonies in the surrounding area. Volunteers patrol it at night with the sort of hand held bat detectors mentioned in a previous post (see, for example, http://www.batbox.com/) and premises at which bats are detected, the new colonies, are logged onto the central bat register (CBR). Note that all volunteers carry photo id to avoid late night misunderstandings in the bushes.

This is important as, following the tagging of a bat clause onto the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act during its passage through the Upper House, it is illegal to disturb a registered bat colony without first having sought the (paid) advice of a registered bat surveyor. And guess where all the bat surveyors live - in the Batwatch outfit. Some people think that this is all a bit of a scam, a wheeze for long hairs - possibly defectives - to sponge a living off the rest of us, especially those of us living in older or isolated properties. I associate to the deranged long hair who watches foxes in Volume 11 of the collected works of Morse, 'The Secret of Bay 5b'.

Of course, the bats may pale into insignificance if the balance of the site were to be allocated to immigrant travellers.

PS: in the course of recording all this I got to wondering about the origin of calling someone batty. First association was to 'blind as a bat', a phrase which I suppose to derive from the poor eyesight of some bats, even though they are not blind. Then OED I (1888) confirms that 'batty' once meant bat like, so I presume its current meaning of mental defective does indeed come by association to people old enough to have become blind, who might also be old enough to have become demented.