What is CSFT doing?

CSFT is running a year long campaign to coincide with the European celebration involving a range of activities for novices and bat experts alike. There are three themes to the campaign:

· Public awareness raising and involvement

· Conservation action

· Research and science

We will be organising public events and attending other community and corporate events with our stand, to raise awareness of Scotland’s bats and dispel some of the myths that surround them. We will be contacting primary schools in the area to get them involved in the campaign by providing ‘bat boxes’ – resources for teachers to use and a free bat box kit for them to build and put up in their school grounds. We will also be contacting Forest Schools to work with them to improve their local woodlands for bats.

We will be organising and running several surveys throughout the year, and actively supporting the Bat Conservation Trust’s National Bat Monitoring Programme (NBMP). For example, we will be organising a Central Scotland Nathusius Pipistrelle survey during May and September to try to gain more information on the distribution of this little known species in the Forest. We are also organising a season long ‘Bats and Woodlands’ research survey looking at how different species of bats use woodlands in Central Scotland across the season by running fortnightly surveys in one of CSFT’s woodlands. For more information on getting involved in these, or the NBMP surveys, get in touch.

Finally, we will be running a programme of guided walks across the Forest during August and September, so come along and learn about the bats in your area. 

What can you do.....

You can do lots! Get your local school involved by asking your teacher to get one of our school activity packs, come along to one of our events or walks, make a bat box and put it up in your garden, plant wildlife friendly flowers to encourage the insects that the bats feed on, download some of the activities here, or on the BCT website, and, most importantly, tell people about bats and how great they are!

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