Bat fatality

We are busy getting the houses ready for the start of the season in May.  This is an annual task which sees us in work clothes and paint-spattered for a good eight weeks.  All the nooks and crannies of accumulated junk have to be cleared.  The cave under the house is a great storage place, it keeps an even temperature during the year and was formerly where the wine was stored.  The huge barrels which are still there, are now acting as housing for David's wood scraps.  For twenty years we have had a colony of Pipistrellus pipistrellus hanging from its vaulted ceiling.  All summer long they fly in and out of the cave entrance in the courtyard, wheeling round in the warm summer air catching insects on the wing.  We have had many broods of young but this year our first fatality!

I found his dessicated body on the stone floor where I mistook him for a dead leaf.  He weighs 1 gram! David dusted him off and he has been added to our collection of dead beetles and tiny bird skeletons that lives in David's studio.