STANDING at my back door to get a breath of fresh air at about midnight the other night I was fascinated by the aerobatics of a bat swooping and cavorting in the lane outside my back gate.

I know they’re not everyone’s cup of tea and like most people, I daresay, the thought of blood-sucking vampire bats gives me the creeps, but the fact is that most bats are entirely beneficial.

Cacti, for example – and who doesn’t love cacti? – in their native region of the American South-West are almost exclusively pollinated by bats.

And what’s true of cacti is true of any amount of trees and shrubs of the tropics and sub-tropics.

The wild species of bananas – from which the cultivated, commercial varieties are derived – are, again, exclusively pollinated by bats. No bats – no bananas.

So let’s accept that, however weird they look, bats are worth looking after and protecting – and admiring, too, if only for their amazing agility in flight and wonderful powers of echo-location.

Tony Kelly, Crook, Co Durham.

YOUR letter from R Moses (HAS, July 6) continued the subject of birds not returning from migration. My “old” mate and I enjoy a beer watching bats on summer evenings hawking flies in High Street, Carrville – only this year we have not seen a single bat. Yet.

Bats make up one-fifth of mammal species worldwide.

There are 18 species in the UK with many under threat. I read recently that in the US there is a bat “plague”, as they put it.

They think it is spreading further afield.

Lots of bird species are in severe decline, bees are seriously under threat and the Government’s paltry £12m for bee research should be £12bn.

A couple of years ago, China pollinated its pear crop by hand as there were insufficient bees to do the job. Einstein said that when the bees go, the human race will follow four years later.

Well, the bees are going – along with lots of other species.

Bees are the “canary in the coal mine” and we should be very concerned as there is something out there killing our wildlife. Does anyone else out there remember DDT?

Malcolm Rolling, Carrville, Durham.