Bats at large, unseasonably, on a mild winter afternoon

Harlech The light was fading, but those small round wings, and the sound they made, could only belong to a bat

In the woods at the end of a sunlit afternoon, clouds of gnats swirled in slant shafts of light filtering through bare oak branches. The temperature held unseasonably mild even as the sun poured itself like melting wax behind the western peninsula.

I was aware of the presence before I saw it. It fluttered erratically into view on rounded wings, quartered several times the space the gnats inhabited, and flickered away in a mayhem of fractured movement and felt sound. A bat. Probably a lesser horseshoe bat, from its small size and those rounded wings, though identification of bat species in flight is notoriously difficult - especially in the dim light of winter gloaming.

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