We have long known the danger that glass façades present to anything with wings, so definitively pinned down in the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov’s great Pale Fire:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff — and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky […]

What is far less well known, however, is the perils that huge expanses of reflective surfaces present specifically to bats, creatures which exist in abundant variety along our North Norfolk coast.

Recently, the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft — Germany’s internationally-respected research and science organisation — published a fascinating report on the way in which large areas of glass affect bats’ ecolocation abilities. A summary of the report is presented here.

It appears that bats are hard-wired to interpret large, smooth vertical surfaces not as barriers, but as open flyways. This is particularly true when bats are in a hurry or under stress, as at such moments they are forced to interpret their own ecolocation data in a more cursory way. The danger this poses is obvious.

The report summary concludes as follows:

“The animals in this study could not fly fast in the flight room and therefore did not get injured. However, besides millions of birds, dead and injured bats can also be found underneath glass fronts. The researchers suggest a systematic recording of such cases in order to better understand the actual impact on the animals and take measures on buildings with large glass facades at crucial sites such as “migratory highways,” key foraging habitats, or bat colonies.”

Rural Norfolk is an area rich in bats. As an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Glaven Valley area enjoys a rich and varied bat population. Some of these bats are rather unusual. A survey of the bats in a local barn, for instance, detected Leisler’s Bat, which is rare for this part of the UK. Many of us hugely enjoy our proximity to bats, because while e.g. droppings on a church altar cloth can be a nuisance, the magnificently erratic, almost playful flight of our local ‘pips’ is surely one of the great joys of any summer evening here. Bat are important.

At one level, the NNDC planning process acknowledges the significance of North Norfolk’s bat population. Wildlife surveys take account, at least in theory, of the impact of new building — with its concomitant destruction of trees, undergrowth, unpaved surfaces, night-time darkness and the like — on the local wildlife population.

But on the other hand, the blithe and unreflective willingness of the NNDC planning committee to embrace non-traditional, trendy, off-the-shelf Modernist projects as somehow exciting, forward-looking and desirable totally ignores their effect not only on the visual character of our distinctive coastal region, but also their impact on wildlife. Although the developers who try to sell such projects invariably market them as ‘eco-friendly’, in fact the huge footprints, gigantic paved areas in which to stable legions of spotless shiny new Rangerovers, and egregious light-pollution are anything but kind to the local environment.

And now the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft has revealed another danger of such ill-thought-out, non-traditional buildings: they kill bats. More traditionalist structures here have their window surfaces broken up by a relatively tight network of timber, lead or steel glazing bars. Modernist houses generally just have vast slabs of glass. One can understand the desire of developers to provide a view of the landscape — North Norfolk is very beautiful, at least when one is looking out of one of these behemoths, rather than towards it — but doing so in this particular way has the effect of ruining that very landscape, and endangering its longtime natural populations, whilst pretending to embrace these.