Have you ever wondered why the German name for bats is “Fledermaus” (flutter-mouse)? I mean, what is so mousy about the funny little animals? Take a close look at one and you’ll soon see. The face is exactly like that of a mouse. To be honest, I have never actually seen a bat close up myself. They just frighten the life out of me at night when they fly silent zigzags in the dark. I have been thinking about them for quite some time, though, because they had settled in some of the trees in the middle of our construction site. They like to use deep cracks in the trees for their summer quarters. Obviously, we didn’t just fell the trees without making sure the flying mice were safe first. How did we do that, you ask? We marked the trees the bats had settled in and only cut them down once the bats had moved to their winter quarters. That’s not all, either. For every tree felled, we are planting new ones on different sites close to the airport. One of the sites is Rotberger Becken. We have improved the ecology of that site so much our fluttering bat friends now feel quite at home there.

Wersja drukowana berlin-airport.de (Copyright Berliner Flughäfen)