Wildlife crime represents a serious threat to many of our most vulnerable wildlife species. This is particularly true of bats because many of the UKs 17 resident bat species can live in close proximity to people. BCT has been working on the issue of bat crime since 2001.

BCT have recently welcomed a new Wildlife Crime Officer to the Bat Conservation Trust; Mark Goulding. Mark has a long history in handling wildlife crime cases as a police officer. In his role at BCT he is available to the police; Crown Prosecution Service; Bat Groups; members of the public; professional ecologists; local planning authorities; and other planning, development or conservation professionals. He can provide advice, support and training in relation to the prevention, investigation and prosecution of conservation wildlife crime. Crime prevention is BCTs priority. However, around 20% of allegations result in criminal offences being identified and can lead to criminal prosecutions. In the most serious cases offenders have been fined as much as £18,000, while minor offences have been dealt with out of court but in a manner providing conservation benefit.

Wildlife crime offences are not recordable or notifiable to the Home Office and therefore the true extent of such crime is only known through projects like BCTs Wildlife Crime Project. We continue to lobby for change in this respect through our work with the Bat Crime Priority Delivery Group and Wildlife and Countryside Link.

We provide advice and support on wildlife crime cases for free to increase accessibility to our service; in 2019 we handled 174 wildlife crime cases where the police were involved (and countless more cases that we didnt record) and trained hundreds of police officers. Please do donate to BCT if you benefit from this service or have benefitted from this service previously. We are currently running the project without funding and sufficient donations will enable us to sustain this extremely important role in the longer term. A donation of £10 will enable us to take a short call on a wildlife crime case; £60 will enable us to discuss a case in greater detail; £160 will enable us to produce a Conservation Impact Statement to support a wildlife crime case in court; £450 will facilitate the preparation and delivery of training to up to 30 police officers.

To find out more about this project please visit: https://www.bats.org.uk/our-work/bearing-witness-for-wildlife/bat-crime

Photo credit: Daniel Hargreaves/www.bats.org.uk