Experts are warning that Britain’s gray long-eared bats are facing extinction because of the loss of the UK’s marshlands. What’s more, this may be just one casualty of increasing habitat loss.

Britain’s Bat Conservation Trust, in a new publication called Conserving Grey Long-Eared Bats in our Landscape, has warned that there may be as few as 1,000 gray long-eared bats left in the UK because of the “dramatic decline” of their habitats.

The gray long-eared bats, already considered one of Britain’s rarest of species, are generally to be found hunting for food, usually moths, in lowland meadows and marshlands. Their distribution is primarily confined along the south of the British Isles in places like Sussex, Devon, Somerset, the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands.