Meet the man who has spent 20 years transforming his garden into a haven - for bats.
Ross Baker, 66, has long been fascinated with the flying mammals - and sees himself as their PR representative as they get such a bad rap.
He has spent hours installing boxes, sculptures and a pond in his large garden in Weybridge, Surrey, so bats can pop in for a rest.
Though the grandfather-of-four welcomes all wildlife into his garden, he admits he isn't such a big fan of cats - which regularly injure bats by taking swipes at them.
Ross Baker, 66, has long been fascinated with the flying mammals - and sees himself as their PR representative as they get such a bad rap.
He has spent hours installing boxes, sculptures and a pond in his large garden in Weybridge, Surrey, so bats can pop in for a rest.
Though the grandfather-of-four welcomes all wildlife into his garden, he admits he isn't such a big fan of cats - which regularly injure bats by taking swipes at them.
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FunTranscript
00:00 We are here in the garden of the house we have lived in for just coming up for 20 years
00:05 now.
00:06 Ever since we have been here we have tried to do stuff to improve it for wildlife.
00:09 What made you get so heavily invested in bats?
00:12 I was interested in them when I remember seeing them in the village I lived in as a kid down
00:17 in Hampshire.
00:19 When they advertised the bat group in their newsletter I thought that is something to
00:23 investigate and get involved in.
00:25 That was 35 years, well more than 35 years ago now I have been getting on for 40 years
00:30 thinking about it and I have been involved in bats ever since.
00:33 One of the motivations for creating a wildlife garden was to encourage bats into the garden
00:40 and we have done that by having things in here which produce lots of nectar because
00:46 if you want to encourage bats you have to start from the bottom and work your way up.
00:50 So British bats eat insects, nothing but insects, so the first thing you need to do is to encourage
00:57 the insects in your garden.
00:58 The best way to do that is to have a pond.
01:01 So the very first thing we did when we moved in was build a pond down the bottom of the
01:05 garden.
01:07 So the next thing was to put some bat boxes up and we have got three bat boxes of three
01:11 different designs in the garden and one of them, the CJM which is just up on my right
01:18 here, has proved to be the most popular and as we speak there are five Soprano Pipistrelles
01:24 nestled up in there and they will be moving out shortly probably to go into their summer
01:28 maternity roost to give birth and have a baby.
01:32 People think of bats probably as being all black, rather like this thing here, but they
01:38 are not at all, they are all sorts of different colours.
01:42 The rarity factor, the fact that bats are fundamentally all around us, they are in quite
01:47 urban scenarios sometimes and yet most people don't know anything about them at all.
01:53 And it is the fact that it is quite difficult to study them, quite difficult to find them,
02:00 to see them, to identify them.
02:04 So yes, there is so much to learn about bats all the time.