A Profile of

BOB STEBBINGS, SNS PRESIDENT

From a lay member’s position it may be difficult to understand how an official, like the President, performs. Those who have worked on the SNS Council during the past 14 odd years and have witnessed activity at that level, however, have applauded Bob Stebbings’ Presidency of our Society. More than ever he has quietly overseen the affairs of the Council from the President’s chair which he makes a point of filling. He has brought to the role not only an active involvement but also a wealth of knowledge and experience, which has provided Council with a reliable point of reference. He is otherwise inclined to be unobtrusive until things look in danger of going seriously off the rails. Today we appeal to Bob to give us the benefit of his Presidency for a further term.

1992 was a memorable year for us because it was rumoured that Britain’s own ‘Batman’, Bob Stebbings, was about to become our next President. At that time, quite apart from anything else, Bob had just received the Mammal Society’s prestigious Silver Medal Award. Although he is a formidable all-round naturalist, Bob is the man most likely to appear in the media banging the drum for bats. He was one of the small group of naturalists in Europe who first noticed a serious decline in bat populations. Since that time Bob has striven tirelessly to gain protection internationally for these greatly maligned creatures. The task of gaining bats full protection under British law required not only hard work to build an objective picture of the threats they faced, but also a relentless campaign to enlighten ordinary people about the true lives that bats lived. Getting the record straight for the humble bat was no mean feat as it had been vilified by ‘X certificate’ film makers for decades. Today the battle to roll back opinion has become a well-oiled machine and people now understand that if they have bats in their belfry they have been graced by visitors to boast about. With a rack of books and a barrow-load of papers on his subject, Bob is a formidable champion of bats. His face is now known internationally and his opinion on bats is often considered to be the last word on the creatures.

Although he seems very much a part of Peterborough where he lives today, Bob will probably always be associated with Bury St Edmunds where he was born and spent his childhood. Like other leading naturalists, it is interesting that he clearly displayed a fascination with wildlife from a very early age. His mother recalled him as an infant spending many hours studying snails and other creatures in the garden. Times and dates of events, even those far back into his childhood, are recalled by him without hesitation. Today his home abounds with all the documents and paraphernalia that running The Robert Stebbings Consultancy entails, and yet it says a great deal for his attention to detail that he can usually produce without difficulty records and documents that have been carefully preserved over many years.

At the age of six or seven he recalls making a conscious decision not to join the popular movement to study birds but instead opted to study insects, beetles in particular. Even as a lad he was an outstanding naturalist and it was probably the best thing that could have happened for the welfare of British bats that he was introduced to Dr Owen J.W. Gilbert. At that time, along with a handful of other bat enthusiasts elsewhere, Dr Gilbert had begun to ring hibernating bats, and among his chosen subjects were those that roosted in the chalk caves at Bury St Edmunds. Within a very short space of time of seeing him at this work, Dr Gilbert felt confident enough about the capabilities of young Stebbings to leave him to continue the ringing operations alone. It was surely no mean feat for a ten year old to conduct important work in conditions he admits today he often found quite ‘spooky’. The study broke new ground and revealed many previously unknown aspects of bat ecology. A ‘seasoned campaigner’ at the ripe old age of sixteen years in 1957, he then received a letter from one of Suffolk’s best-known naturalists encouraging him to join the Suffolk Naturalists’ Society. It was no less than the then President himself, the late Lord Cranbrook, who wrote to Bob and described his mammalian interests in Suffolk ‘where I plough a very lonely mammalian furrow’. Thus began an enduring working relationship between two dynamic naturalists that was to lead eventually to Westminster and the foundations of the Wild Creatures and Wild Plants Act, 1975 and later the Wildlife and Countryside Act – a law which was to afford protection to every species of bat in the land, not just two as in the first Act.

Bob’s father was an electrical engineer of some standing who did much to excite the curiosity and stimulate the learning of his four children. Although neither of Bob’s parents was particularly well versed in the subject of natural history, it was always an area of interest to them. By the time he was ready to leave school, Bob was an established naturalist who had published his first paper with Owen Gilbert on the ‘Winter roosts of bats in West Suffolk’ some four years previously and had made the outstanding discovery of the Lesser Horseshoe Bat at Bury. It was hardly surprising when he turned down a promising career in industry to take up temporary work for a lot less money with the Nature Conservancy at Furzebrook, Dorset in 1960. So great has been his impact on the world of bats that it is difficult to imagine that Bob could be interested in anything else, but, in fact he has always enjoyed a wide ranging interest in wildlife of all sorts. At Furzebrook his greater responsibility was for the study of salt-marsh plant communities and at the same time he made significant progress with the study of grass snakes, adders and smooth snakes. Bats continued to figure in his activities at that time as an amateur interest, as they have throughout the greater part of his life, and he learned enough about the Greater Horseshoe bat in Dorset to issue stern warnings about its population’s imminent demise. Early in his professional career with the salt-marsh plant project he was part of a small team involved in the development of a number of revolutionary projects, like aerial mapping of vegetation and the design and construction of experimental controlled environmental growth chambers for monitoring salt-marsh plants. Like another idea for an infrared laser torch he developed later for bat studies, the control system he devised for growth chambers was subsequently patented by one of the manufacturers he had quizzed when searching for components he needed.

From Furzebrook he was moved to Norfolk with a small team to set up at the Colney Research Station to study the salt-marsh ecology there, and, like most of the things he got involved in, he took a leading part in the practical ‘nuts and bolts’ of setting up the project. A thread weaving through his life concerns the great resistance that was always met whenever an authority was asked to invest in the conservation and welfare of bats. It was not only that bats were relatively obscure animals, but in the minds of many they were also objectionable and not worthy of conservation. Bats still had few friends in those days and this was reflected in an interesting clash he had with his employers. The opportunity arose for him to study at the University of East Anglia and he had no doubt in about the subject he should apply his mind to, and it was not the same one that his employer envisaged. By that time he was in a position to finance his own studies, so he confidently resigned from his job and arranged to study bats at the University in his own time. Having demonstrated his determination, within a day he was informed that he could be involved in the well known pollution team at Monks Wood. A year later he was at work and the status of bats moved forward a few more paces. He went on to gain his Ph.D.

The first significant oil pollution disaster to hit the UK was that of the ‘ Torrey Canyon’ in 1968. The history of this event will almost certainly always be associated with the lovable and animated Dr David Bellamy. It is not generally known, however, that Bob Stebbings played a great part in the official response to the tragedy at the time. Bob was involved with setting up the original instructions Infrastructure for Dealing with Oil Pollution at Sea, which had inspired the enquiry. Subsequently advice on how to tackle a potential oil pollution incident has formed part of his work as a Consultant.

Much of his work at Monks Wood has become part of conservation legend. It was he who established the link between certain wood preservatives and high mortality rates in bat roosts. Another little-known fact is that Bob initiated the National Otter Survey for the Mammal Society in 1970 because many had realised that otters had suffered a serious decline in the UK . Such has been the subsequent interest in its plight that the otter is often seen as an emblem for nature conservation in the UK . With the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to imagine that bat protection could have progressed to the extent that it now has when Bob was employed on behalf of the British government to forward the interests of nature conservation. This was a career that came to an end in 1989 when the Thatcher Government made him, along with 160 other Government Environmental Scientists, redundant.

Today he runs his Consultancy from his new Thorpe Road home in Peterborough where he and his wife, Sheila, are in so much demand that it is difficult to insinuate the proverbial cigarette paper in between their busy schedules. The Consultancy provides an independent personal service of specialist species and ecological surveys throughout the British Isles.

Dr R.E. Stebbings Ph.D, CBiol, FIBiol, MIEEM, FZS, FLS, is a naturalist, author, conservationist, R & D technician, structural engineer, caver, rock climber, explorer, diplomat and redoubtable champion of the bat. Long may he continue to be President of the Suffolk Naturalists’ Society.

Eric Parsons