Picture a field of solar panels in the English countryside at dusk.<\/p>\n
The last light fades, and small shapes flit above the glass.<\/p>\n
They are bats, out hunting insects on the warm evening air.<\/p>\n
But over the panels, something about their flight looks wrong.<\/p>\n
They dart across the rows\u00a0faster and straighter\u00a0than normal.<\/p>\n
And most of them refuse to enter\u00a0the heart of the field.<\/p>\n
Animals that see with sound<\/p>\n
Bats find their way through the dark using sound.<\/p>\n
They send out sharp calls and listen for the echoes.<\/p>\n
That echo map lets them hunt insects in total blackness.<\/p>\n
It works beautifully, but it has one strange blind spot.<\/p>\n
A smooth, flat surface bounces their call straight back.<\/p>\n
To a bat, that clean echo means one thing, water.<\/p>\n
For millions of years, only calm water gave that signal.<\/p>\n
Bats swoop down to such surfaces to drink on the wing.<\/p>\n
They skim the top and lap up water without ever landing.<\/p>\n
A sheet of glass can send back the very same echo.<\/p>\n
A polished solar panel is just as flat and smooth.<\/p>\n
Scientists call this a\u00a0sensory trap.<\/p>\n
The bat\u2019s own senses are turned\u00a0against it.<\/p>\n
The clean energy paradox<\/p>\n
Solar farms are spreading fast across the world.<\/p>\n
Most of the news about them is good for nature.<\/p>\n
Foxes den under the panels and birds nest along the rows.<\/p>\n
Bees and wildflowers often thrive in the untouched grass.<\/p>\n
The shaded ground can even shelter rare plants and insects.<\/p>\n
Whole meadows have bloomed in the calm space between rows.<\/p>\n
So solar sites are usually seen as friendly to wildlife.<\/p>\n
But not every animal reads the panels the same way.<\/p>\n
For bats, a wide field of glass can look like a lake.<\/p>\n
That raised a simple question for researchers.<\/p>\n
Do bats treat a solar farm as\u00a0water or as ground?<\/p>\n
To find out, they went\u00a0into the fields.<\/p>\n
A study across the English countryside<\/p>\n
Ecologists set out to measure bats at working solar farms.<\/p>\n
The team studied 19 solar sites scattered across England.<\/p>\n
These were not lab tests but real farms in the landscape.<\/p>\n
At each one, they placed sensitive acoustic detectors.<\/p>\n
The devices record the calls bats make as they fly.<\/p>\n
Detectors sat at the edges and deep in the panel rows.<\/p>\n
Others were set in nearby fields with no panels at all.<\/p>\n
That let the team compare bat life on and off the arrays.<\/p>\n
They logged night after night of recordings through the season.<\/p>\n
Software then sorted the calls by species and by place.<\/p>\n
It built a clear picture of where the bats chose to fly.<\/p>\n
One species, the common pipistrelle, made up\u00a0most of the calls.<\/p>\n
And its numbers told\u00a0a stark story.<\/p>\n
What the recordings showed<\/p>\n
Here is what the detectors actually picked up.<\/p>\n
According to\u00a0one report<\/a>, bat activity fell sharply over the solar panels.<\/p>\n Along the edges of the fields, calls dropped by about 40 percent.<\/p>\n In the very middle of the panels, the fall was far worse.<\/p>\n There, activity crashed by around 86 percent.<\/p>\n Overall, bat activity was roughly halved at the field boundaries.<\/p>\n Toward the center, it dropped by close to two thirds.<\/p>\n The bats were not dying, they were simply staying away.<\/p>\n The busy field edges still drew a fair share of hunters.<\/p>\n But the open core of glass sat almost deserted at night.<\/p>\n Companion experiments help explain why they flee the glass.<\/p>\n Fooled into seeing water, the bats\u00a0avoid the panels.<\/p>\n A whole field turns into\u00a0a hole in their world.<\/p>\n What it means, and how to fix it<\/p>\n A solar farm is meant to help the planet, not harm its wildlife.<\/p>\n For bats, though, a big array can act like a barrier.<\/p>\n It can cut a foraging route or split a feeding ground in two.<\/p>\n Night after night, the animals must detour around the glass.<\/p>\n Bats already face heavy pressure from habitat loss and disease.<\/p>\n A new empty zone in the landscape does not help.<\/p>\n The good news is that the fix may be fairly simple.<\/p>\n Hedges, gaps, and green strips can guide bats around the panels.<\/p>\n Smart layouts could keep flight paths open through a site.<\/p>\n According to\u00a0one account<\/a>, the smooth panels mimic the echo of water.<\/p>\n The same tension between clean power and wildlife shows up elsewhere, from a\u00a0solar farm<\/a>\u00a0fox to the seals near an\u00a0offshore wind farm<\/a>.<\/p>\n Researchers say the aim is not to stop solar at all.<\/p>\n It is to build the next farms with a little more care.<\/p>\n Solar power can still grow without leaving bats behind.<\/p>\n It just means building with\u00a0their strange senses\u00a0in mind, one hedgerow\u00a0at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Picture a field of solar panels in the English countryside at dusk. The last light fades, and small…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":["post-556277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}