Bats, welcome to the farms of Hauts-de-France: “We also help them so that they help us”

The beam of Louis Hue's lamp sweeps through the gloom, revealing several small, motionless brown masses, hanging by their legs from the barn roof. "One, two, three," counts the naturalist from the Picardie Nature association. A fourth, awakened by the commotion, slaloms between the beams, making the ultrasonic detector crackle. "That's a small horseshoe bat, you can recognize them by the alien noises they make to move," he explains.

After a complete inspection of Michel Gobron's farm in Sainte-Croix (Aisne), eighteen bats were counted. Fewer than the sixty seen during the last visit, carried out at the beginning of July, just after the birthing season. "I'm going to end up becoming Batman," jokes the farmer. In addition to his abandoned barn, which serves as a shelter for isolated male greater horseshoe bats and as a maternity ward for a colony of lesser horseshoe bats – two endangered species in the region, his attic is home to a colony of common serotines.

Mr. Gobron's 80 hectares (corn, wheat, barley, and rapeseed) are among around thirty farms where roosts have been identified as part of the Action Plan for Chiroptera – the scientific name for bats – in Hauts-de-France. This strategy aims to slow the decline of several species , such as the common noctule, whose populations fell by more than 50% between 2006 and 2023 , or the common pipistrelle, which lost a quarter of its numbers during the same period.

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