Baby Planning Season

May is a busy month for Jersey’s bats, even if you can’t quite see why yet. Behind the scenes — inside roosts hidden in roof spaces, cliff crevices, and old stone walls — female bats are settling in and preparing to give birth.

By mid-May, many of the bat species’ maternity colonies are fully returned to their roosts. These are often small, precious groups (relative to European roosts), and each one matters enormously.

The longer evenings mean bat watching is increasingly rewarding this month — it’s light until well past 9pm by late May, making it much easier to actually spot bats as they emerge rather than just hearing them on a detector.

Insect-rich spots — ponds, river valleys, the hedgerow network — are the places to look. Jersey’s bocage landscape, with its dense network of sunken lanes and hedges, is particularly good bat habitat, and May evenings there can be genuinely magical.