In 1992 I had to count them in tens. This June I counted them on my fingers.
“In 1992 I had to count them in tens. This June I counted them on my fingers — and I had enough fingers.”
Why a seventy-two-year-old retired roofer from the Stroud valleys is letting his last hand-built bat boxes go at a special price — before his hand gives out for good.
Last light over the Stroud valleys. The chapel at the bottom of this valley held nearly four hundred bats when Malcolm Reeve first counted it. This June it held fifty-four.
Sit out in the garden on a warm evening in July and start a timer. Ten minutes, and the midges have found the backs of your hands. The candle does nothing. Somebody fetches the spray. By half past nine everyone has gone inside, in the middle of the best hour of the year.
Here is the part almost nobody is told. There is an animal that does this job for free, all night, and asks for nothing in return. A common pipistrelle weighs about five grams — the same as a twenty-pence piece — and can take up to three thousand insects in a single night. It comes out about twenty minutes after sunset, works two to ten metres above the lawn, and catches everything on the wing.
It isn’t only the biters, either. The same bat works the whole garden after dark: moths, midges, gnats, the small beetles whose grubs get into the veg patch long before anyone notices. One small colony clears tens of thousands of insects a night, every night, in complete silence, for nothing.
- Up to 3,000 insects taken in a single night.
- Five grams — the whole animal weighs what a twenty-pence piece weighs.
- Twenty minutes after sunset — out and hunting, every night from spring to autumn.
- Garden pests too — moths and beetles whose larvae go through the veg patch.
- No spray, no cost, no noise — and it only ever asks for somewhere to sleep.
That last part is the whole problem. Somewhere to sleep is exactly what has been taken away from them, across this country, roof by roof, over about forty years.
The man who can tell you precisely how it happened spent forty-four years doing it for a living.
Every summer roost in Britain is somebody’s roof
A pipistrelle climbs up into the open bottom of one of Malcolm’s boxes — the only way in, and the same way it would go up under a slate. The tight grooves waiting inside are what hold it.
This is the fact that changes how you see the problem. Our bats don’t spend the summer in caves. They spend it in buildings — in the warm dry seam behind a fascia board, in a roof void, under a ridge tile, behind hanging tiles, in the roof of a barn or a church tower. Eighteen species live in the UK and almost all of them raise their young inside something a person built.
Which means every roost in the country sits inside a building that somebody, eventually, is going to do up.
All eighteen species are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the Habitats Regulations, and a roost stays protected even when it is empty, because bats come back to the same seam year after year. On paper, that ought to settle it.
In practice, three things have happened at once.
The barns stopped being barns
A leaky stone barn full of gaps is one of the best maternity roosts we’ve got. A converted barn is a sealed unit. The same is true of a re-roofed farmhouse, a loft conversion, new soffits, and the ordinary business of making an old building warm. Nobody does it out of malice. All of it closes the gaps.
The felt changed, and nobody told the men on the roofs
This is the detail almost no homeowner has heard, and it’s the one Malcolm Reeve most wants people to know. Modern breathable roofing membranes are spun from fine non-woven filaments. A bat’s claws tease those filaments loose, and the loose threads catch around its feet and wing membranes. A four-year study by the University of Reading with the Bat Conservation Trust concluded that all non-woven breathable membranes pose an entanglement risk to bats. The Trust’s advice is plain: they should not go into a roof used by bats. Bitumen felt should be used instead.
“They changed the felt and nobody told the men on the roofs,” Malcolm says. “I did it myself for years before I knew. That’s the part I’d like back.”
And the food went
The other half of it. The Bugs Matter survey, run by Kent Wildlife Trust with the charity Buglife, has volunteers count the insects splattered on their number plates after a journey. Between 2021 and 2024 the count fell by 63 per cent — and by roughly 60 per cent across two decades. Over the same era, more than 300,000 miles of hedgerow have gone since 1945: about half the network, and hedges are the roads bats use to get from the roost to the feeding ground.
- 18 species, all legally protected — and a roost stays protected even when empty.
- Almost every summer roost is inside a building somebody will eventually renovate.
- All non-woven breathable roof membranes pose an entanglement risk (University of Reading / Bat Conservation Trust).
- 63% fewer flying insects on number plates in 2024 than in 2021 (Bugs Matter, Kent Wildlife Trust & Buglife).
- 300,000+ miles of hedgerow lost since 1945 — the routes they fly.
Put those together and you get an animal that is being asked to raise one pup a year, on less food, with fewer routes to it, out of a building that has just been sealed shut. A dry, cool, correctly built crevice on the back of a house isn’t a nice gesture. At this point it’s the missing part.
The boxes that fail the animal they were built for
Up close: rough bark to climb and thick untreated timber that holds a steady temperature through an afternoon. Almost nothing sold online has either.
Search for a bat box online and you’ll find hundreds of thin, flat, mass-produced ones, most of them from the same few factories. They look right in a photograph. A bat worker would call most of them empty at best. There are five reasons why, and Malcolm can name all five without looking up from the bench.
Malcolm knew every one of these before he ever cut a board for one. He had spent forty-four years on the other side of the problem.
The man who took their roofs off for a living
Malcolm in the cart shed at the end of the cottage. “A router screams,” he says. “I’ve spent thirty-odd years trying to keep things quiet for them. I’m not going to start now.”
Malcolm Reeve went up his first ladder at sixteen and came down off his last roof at sixty. Forty-four years of Cotswold stone slates: farmhouses, chapels, mill roofs, barns, half the parish between Amberley and Nailsworth. He is seventy-two now and lives in a cottage he re-roofed himself in 1979.
He is dry, exact and slightly funny, and he has the authority of a man who has physically held the thing he is describing. When he tells you what happens under a roof, he isn’t quoting a leaflet. He put the roof on.
The turn came in July 1991. A chapel job in the next valley. He had the south slope stripped by ten in the morning.
“There were bats up in there. Soprano pipistrelles, though I wouldn’t have known that then, I’d have said mice with wings. And there were young ones, and the young ones couldn’t fly yet.” He stops. “I’d taken half a roof off over the top of them.”
He put the slates back. All of them, that same afternoon, at his own cost, and told the chapel warden the job would wait until September. It cost him the rest of the summer’s work and, he says, a fair bit of his reputation for a year or two.
“Fellow asked me what I was playing at. I said I’d found something living up there. He said, ‘It’s only bats.’” Malcolm looks up for the first time. “That’s the whole thing, isn’t it. It’s only bats.”
From that autumn on he re-roofed with bitumen felt and left the gaps where he found them. And every June from 1992, he counted.
What forty-four years of roofs builds into a box
One of the finished boxes. Solid untreated timber, bark left on, narrow crevices between — and an open bottom, because that’s the only door a bat wants.
Everything Malcolm learned taking roofs apart is built into these. Not as features on a label. As the fix for each of the five ways the cheap ones fail.
The count he keeps from a headstone
The same flat headstone, every June since 1992. “Twenty past nine or thereabouts, they come out of the gap under the ridge.”
There’s a Nonconformist chapel at the bottom of his valley — the kind the Stroud cloth trade put up by the dozen — and its roof void holds a soprano pipistrelle maternity roost. Mothers only, May to August, one pup each. Malcolm has counted them out at dusk almost every June for thirty-four years, from the same flat headstone in the burial ground, with a flask of tea.
“In 1992 I gave up counting them one at a time and started counting them in tens. Three hundred and eighty-six that year. You couldn’t keep up with them.”
“Two thousand and ten, I had a hundred and seventy-four.”
“This June I counted every single one of them individually, on my fingers.” He pauses. “Fifty-four. I did it twice. I thought I’d lost count.”
“You shouldn’t have enough fingers. That’s the whole of it, right there.”
The chapel roof never changed. It’s the same slate, the same gap under the ridge, the same roost it has been for longer than anyone can remember. The valley around it is what changed. And that’s exactly why he thinks a box on the back of a house is worth something now, when thirty years ago it would have been a curiosity.
Why these are the last he will make
Malcolm with one of the last sixty-eight. “A hundred-and-forty-pound box sits in a catalogue,” he says. “A cheap one goes on the back of somebody’s house.”
There’s a reason the stack against the shed wall is the last one. Forty-four years on ladders and pitched roofs took both knees first — the right one is a replacement from 2019, the left is on a list. That’s what ended the roofing.
What is ending the boxes is his right hand. It’s a Dupuytren’s contracture: the ring finger is pulling down into the palm, a little further every year.
“The sawing I can still do, and I can still swing a mallet,” he says. “It’s the boring, mind. Holding the brace dead level through two inches of oak so the slot comes out true — a quarter of an inch out and you haven’t made a roost. My hand doesn’t sit flat on the brace any more. It goes off at the end of the cut, and I can feel it go.”
There’s no apprentice. His son is a quantity surveyor in Swindon. “I’m the last one in this shed,” he says, with no drama at all. What is left of the work is stacked along the stone: 68 finished boxes, the last he expects to make.
“I want them on houses, not in a catalogue”
Dusk at the shed: a colony pours out of the open bottom of one of the boxes to hunt. “That’s the bit you never get tired of,” he says.
He prices them low deliberately, and he’ll tell you so at length, unprompted.
“A length of fallen oak and two days of my time. Somebody down in Cirencester would want a hundred and forty quid for that, and they’d be right to. But a hundred-and-forty-pound box goes in a catalogue and sits there looking lovely. A cheap one goes on the back of somebody’s house. I want them on houses.”
What he wants is specific, and none of it is about him. He wants a pipistrelle shut out of a re-roofed farmhouse in April to have somewhere dry and cool to raise a pup that same summer, because that is the only way the count ever climbs again: one pup at a time, one mother at a time. He wants the midges over somebody’s garden eaten instead of sprayed. He wants somebody in twenty years to sit down at dusk and give up trying to count.
“I took the roofs off. Forty-four years of it, and I did it properly, and I’d do most of it again. I’ve just got what’s left to put a few back on.”
What people are saying about Malcolm’s boxes
Before you decide
Malcolm won’t build another stack of these. The pipistrelles that have been shut out of the roofs around this valley are out there right now, looking for somewhere dry and cool to raise what comes next. A box on the back of your house is one more place they find it — and one more garden the midges don’t get to own.