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MONDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 2023


KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE SKIES! BAT WALKING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE



Words and images by Miranda Gavin





This is my first Bat Walk (Saturday 2 September 2023) and I’ve come to Emberton
Country Park, situated in the village of Emberton just a few miles northeast of
Milton Keynes, to learn more about the only mammals that can fly. Led by bat
enthusiast and Buckinghamshire County recorder for dragonflies, Alan Nelson, and
Emberton Country Park ranger, Stephen Barnes-Green, the group listening to
Alan’s introductory talk is larger than I expected, and I count almost 30 adults
and children. But it’s the bat facts and the Batbox that intrigue me.





The UK boasts 18 species of bats, of which 17 breed here and the 200-acre
parkland has, to date, recorded six species—common pipistrelle, soprano
pipistrelle, serotine, barbastelle, noctule and the brown long-eared bat. “We
may have more,” Alan says, adding that a proper survey is needed but it’s
proving hard to find enthusiasts to help.



For now, we’re bat novices finding out about a species that most of us only know
from horror films and DC comics. Bats give birth to one live offspring called a
pup; the young feed on their mother’s milk; they hibernate in the winter, roost,
and like to follow water, especially rivers and canals. There are, we learn,
different types of roosts—bachelor roosts, maternity roosts, and social roosts.
Bats are not blind, instead they use echolocation to navigate the skies and
catch prey in the dark.

Bat Walk leader, Alan Nelson with his Batbox Duet Bat Detector 



Tonight, we expect our first guest to be the noctule. This magnificent bat has a
wingspan the size of a dinner plate and appears just after sunset, followed by
the pipistrelles and the Daubenton’s bat. As dusk sets in, Alan shows us his
Batbox Duet Bat Detector, a device that picks up the sounds emitted by different
bats. Stephen has a bat detector too, but it’s more modern and is linked to his
mobile phone. Not only are bat sounds too high pitched for humans to hear
without these devices, (you can find more about bat detectors on Bat
Conservation Trust's website) but different species can be heard at different
frequencies.



I am curious as to how to describe the various staccato-like clicks of bats, and
Alan tells me that the Daubenton’s bat sounds like marbles being dropped onto a
stone floor. “I started doing bat work many years ago and the assumption was
that they only had one frequency,” Alan explains. “But it’s been proved that
they have a range of frequency which can change. Evolution is wonderful and
we’re still discovering a lot about bats. It’s a big learn.”



Emberton Country Park ranger, Stephen Barnes-Green



Then I ask why bats change their frequency and Alan smiles, “It’s because
they’re intelligent!” We all laugh, including Bella Ashford, the four-year old
who is here with her older sister of 10 and her mother and father, Ben and
Natalie. “Some of our friends were camping here and they found out that there
was a Bat Walk this evening,” Ben says as we set off through the park. “Although
we came last weekend and saw quite a few bats, when they told us about this
walk, we decided to come along and we’re loving it.”




Spotting a noctule

Bat watching is addictive. There’s lots of pointing and looking and we hear them
before we see them. The Batbox picks up a series of chip-chop clicks from the
noctule at around 20kHz, then we spot it zig zagging across the sky. With a
460mm wingspan, the noctule is one of the biggest bats in the UK and I’m
captivated by the way it flies in a straight line, soaring above the treetops,
before swooping suddenly. With its highly dynamic flight path, I ponder that if
it was transposed to a canvas, it could be a form of abstract expressionism,
known as action painting.






The noctule hunts for insects but with an increasing loss of habitat and use of
insecticides, insect populations are dwindling. Once a gravel works, Emberton
was transformed by Milton Keynes City Council into England’s first Country Park
in 1965 and is a haven for wildlife enthusiasts with its four lakes, wooded
glades, and meadows. There are even camping areas and static caravan plots for
longer, more immersive stays.

Alan and Stephen are ambassadors for the wildlife at Emberton Country Park and
their enthusiasm and commitment to educate and protect the natural environment
is infectious. By the end of the walk, I was hooked. We’d sighted five of the
six species found at the park—noctule, soprano pipistrelle, common pipistrelle,
brown long-eared and Daubenton's bat. And it was clear that, if want to protect
this endangered species, there’s a vital need for comprehensive bat surveys. But
with limited resources available, the park is reliant on volunteers, which Is
why Emberton Country Park is reaching out to enthusiasts who would like to take
part.








CALL FOR ACTION: To support a bat survey at Emberton Country Park, please email
emberton.park@milton-keynes.gov.uk or call 01234 711575 for further details.
Alternatively, get in touch to find out about the next bat walk.


Posted by Bat Conservation Trust at 06:56 No comments:





WEDNESDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER 2023


BAT ART TRAIL AT MAYOW PARK





Hello there, I'm Elena Howard, a ceramic artist based in Beckenham (south east
London). I'd love to take you on a journey into my world where art, community,
and the beauty of nature unite.




Art in Unexpected Places

I'm a firm believer in art that's accessible to everyone, every day. That's why
I've been on a mission to weave my art into the tapestry of our local
communities. My canvas? The green spaces of London, brimming with the wonders of
wildlife and the spirit of our neighbourhoods.


A Trail of Inspiration

Over the past few years, I've embarked on a creative odyssey, crafting art
trails for our beloved local parks. These trails represent a blend of my
passions: our remarkable London green spaces and the enchanting wildlife that
calls them home.



 * In Cator Park, I conjured an Owl trail, a whimsical homage to the tawny owls
   that grace the park with their presence. You can often hear them during the
   dark autumn evenings!
 * Betts Park saw the birth of a kingfisher trail, inspired by the delightful
   kingfishers spotted in the park's canal. These ceramic kingfisher figures
   brought an extra touch of magic to the park, celebrating the sense of
   community in Annerley and Penge.


Bats in the Limelight




When the Friends of Mayow Park and Sydenham Arts approached me to create
something special for their upcoming anniversary and Artist Trail, the spotlight
turned to the park's thriving bat population. I was immediately captivated by
the idea and set to work crafting ceramic bats that would beckon park-goers on a
captivating hunt.

Mayow Park has a deep love for its bats, evident in their popular bat walks.
These guided adventures let people marvel at these remarkable creatures, armed
with bat detectors, a thirst for knowledge, and the chance to meet fellow park
enthusiasts. Of course, you don't need to join a walk to catch a glimpse of
these pipistrelles. As the sun dips below the horizon, they gracefully glide
overhead, undisturbed by our presence, as they snatch up their evening meals.
And now you can see some bats in daylight too – in a form of my ceramic
creations!

Bat Hunt Unleashed

For the park, I meticulously crafted over forty ceramic bat tiles. Each
possesses a unique charm, with its own distinct colouring and glazing. I had a
blast experimenting with various glaze combinations, as ceramics often hold the
promise of delightful surprises. We placed these charming bat tiles throughout
the park, always ensuring they found their place on posts, fences, and even the
stumps of fallen trees (never on living trees) – a nod to the circle of life.





We introduced the Bat Hunt to the local park-goers through eye-catching posters
and launched an engaging competition. People were encouraged to unleash their
creativity and design bat-themed art for a chance to win a ceramic bat of their
own, forever guarding their space. I also created a free colouring book,
brimming with bat-themed adventures, to keep the young ones entertained while
fostering a budding interest in bats (the colouring book is available here).

I wanted to infuse even more personality into these ceramic wonders. Some bats
were christened with the names of famous folks who had "Bat" or "Batt" in their
surnames (a surprisingly rare occurrence, it turns out!). Members of public are
invited to vote for other bats’ names (or suggest their own versions), and read
about their personalities on my Instagram.




Wings of Social Engagement





The response on social media has been heartwarming. People have been sharing
their tales of bat discoveries, showcasing the bat-themed art their kids have
been crafting, and giving me creative name suggestions.


And now, as Sydenham Arts Artists Trail begins, I'm ready to introduce another
batch of bats, eagerly awaiting their chance to charm and captivate. My hope is
that these cute creatures will spark curiosity in the hearts of children and
adults alike, igniting a passion for the preservation of our local wildlife.




Website: www.ElenaHoward.com

Instagram: @ElenaHowardClay

Facebook: www.facebook.com/elenahowardclay





Posted by Bat Conservation Trust at 07:48 No comments:





TUESDAY, 29 AUGUST 2023


TESTING OUR DETECTORS FOR THE SEASON



by Rowan Davis, BCT's Science Projects Officer

The bat survey season is well underway and the Science Team at Bat Conservation
Trust (BCT) has sent out hundreds of bat detectors to citizen scientists and
ecologists all over the country. In preparation for this we tested all of our
AudioMoths for wear and tear, performance, and accuracy. We run a whole range of
passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) programs here at BCT  including our citizen
science programs like the British Bat Survey and NightWatch, as well as a series
of other PAM projects like our National Bat Monitoring Programme's Woodland
Survey, our work with Forestry England on rewilding (read more about this here)
and the National Forest Inventory with Forest Research.   





To build a baseline of how our detectors work we partnered with the UCL and used
their anechoic chamber, which is a room in which the walls, ceiling and floor
are lined with a sound absorbent material to minimise reflections (read more
about this room here). Setting up a suite of new AudioMoths, we played bat calls
and digitally produced ultrasonic sweeps in this completely sound-absorbent room
on campus. The strange wedges you can see in the photo stop any echoes by
focussing in the sound waves into the triangular divets and then absorbing them
into their material. The room itself is locked shut behind a huge metal door and
is separated from the outside world by a raised floor, completely cut away from
any sound. It was a ghostly experience and over time being in the room you could
hear the thudding of the blood in your ears and the softest of breaths or
movements in your body. This completely silent environment meant that we could
collect precise measurements of how well our wonderful little detectors perform.
We’ll be sending our audio files up through our sound classification system to
see how our bat identifying algorithms fare, which will also give us interesting
data on its accuracy too!



Due to the cost of using the chamber with its exacting setup, and how long this
incredibly precise assessment takes, we tested the rest of our kit in a music
studio. After building a repeatable methodology and travelling down into south
London, AudioMoths in tow, we spent a couple of days in a drumming studio
playing the same recorded sounds. After testing our hardware, we brought our
data back to the office and have been uploading it to our classifier. Once we
have our baseline data, we can test whether the detectors are getting old or
damaged. This gives us a really good indication of what we can use next season
and sets us up for building long-term monitoring of our beautiful and vital bat
populations across the UK.


Posted by Bat Conservation Trust at 05:36 No comments:





TUESDAY, 15 AUGUST 2023


BATS AT HADDON HALL





Claire Moran, a new Communications Officer at the Bat Conservation Trust, went
to a bat watch at Haddon Hall, one of England's oldest houses. Organised by
Steve Roe and the Derbyshire Bat Conservation Group, attendees got to spend time
with hundreds of bats in an ancient chapel and walk along the River Wye using
bat detectors and thermal cameras. In this blog she tells us what she saw.








BATS IN THE HALL

Hundreds of bats fly about a stained-glass window aglow with sunset. It’s an
enchanting spectacle, and even the shower cap I'm given to protect my hair from
bat wee doesn't make it any less magical.

I'm at Haddon Hall’s first bat watch event, where myself and a handful of
people, are treated to a sight unfortunately rare in the UK: lots of
bats. Certainly, I’ve never seen so many bats. In fact I don’t think I’ve even
seen this many mammals together in real life that aren’t sheep or humans.  

Our watch starts in the chapel which is very old, parts of it date to the 12th
century. I’m no historian, but you can feel the age in its rough walls, which
are covered in colourful drawings of leaves and flowers, religious scenes and
strange symbols. Bats take advantage of the craggy walls, clinging onto them
briefly before dropping down into flight.  






Bats cling to the ancient walls of the chapel of Haddon Hall. 





 

When we enter the chapel at around 8pm, the number of bats flying above us is
already impressive. As is their smell, sweet, musky and somehow familiar,
mammalian – and their chattering squeaks. More bats join the swirls above our
heads every minute.





DERBYSHIRE BAT CONSERVATION GROUP

Steve Roe from Derbyshire Bat Conservation Group (also BCT trustee and creator
of our award-winning podcast) leads the night. Steve tells us the chapel’s bats
are a maternity roost of common and soprano pipistrelles. Some are youngsters,
just weened.  

 

Bats in the chapel at Haddon Hall. Steve Roe (BCT trustee and podcaster,
Derbyshire Bat Conservation Group) talks. 






A great storyteller, Steve conjures up the world of bats, its wonder and
vulnerability. And he sprinkles in some amazing facts, in one instance by
literally sprinkling bat poo to show us how it glitters.  

 

At the end of his talk, the lights are turned off, the doors closed, and somehow
even more bats take to the wing. Now they’re swooping to their exit point, a
crack above the church door. A thermal camera shows us what the shadows conceal,
as the bats consider leaving, think better of it, wheel away, and return. 





HISTORY AT HADDON HALL




Haddon Hall is one of the oldest houses in the UK. Uniquely, it was left
unoccupied for 200 years and so has not been subject to the sort of renovations
other grand houses have undergone.




Approaching it through the Peak District you feel like you’re going back in
time, as A-roads turn into country roads lined with stone walls or old
hedgerows. Once on the grounds, the hall oozes character: part Lord of the
Rings, part Dracula’s castle (in fact some famous fantasy films have been shot
here, including The Princess Bride).




Haddon Hall is not as well-known as great houses like Chatsworth, or rewilding
projects like Knepp, but it deserves to be. It has 187 hectares of parkland,
woodland, river, water meadows, wetlands and former farmland. All sorts of
mammals, insects, plants and fungi live here, and several species of bat forage,
commute or roost on Haddon land. The Hall itself is a bat roost, and they often
find bats behind tapestries.  





BAT DETECTORS ON THE WYE RIVER

With the sun about to disappear, we’re given bat detectors and led to the Wye, a
river which winds through Haddon Hall’s ancient parkland. Clouds of white moths
flutter up from the wild flowers and grasses, food for the bats. The air is
sweet summer air full of pollen and warm earthy tones, fresh after the musk of
the chapel.

In the dark the river looks spectral, it’s glassy surface full of shadows. Have
I even seen a river at night before? I’m not sure I have. Holding my detector, I
feel like a Ghostbuster. Alien sounds, clicks and clacks, faster and louder,
announce bat after bat.




Steve tells us that noctules and Daubenton’s bats are flying over the water. I
can see that some of these are bigger, and they move differently from the
chapel’s bats snaking about above the water.  






Haddon Hall at sunset.





 

We stand awhile on a narrow stone bridge, which looks like goblins made it. It
starts to rain, but it doesn’t dampen the wonder, as we use a thermal camera and
see bats, otherwise invisible, among the trees lining the river.




After this our bat watch is over, and squinting our dark-adapted eyes, we make
our way out of this enchanting place to go home.  





SPECTACLE AND CONSERVATION 

It was both exhilarating and sobering to see so many bats at Haddon Hall. I was
lucky to see such a spectacle, and it made me mad I was so lucky. Humans have so
devastatingly quickly created a world where most people don’t know what a few
hundred bats look like.  

Aside from ethical and practical problems stemming from and causing the
biodiversity crisis, I think it makes us lonely to be without our fellow
species. But places like Haddon act like beacons, they remind us that it wasn’t
always this way, that enchantment used to be part of life, and there is lots we
can do to bring the magic back.  



Images by Haddon Hall. Written by Claire Moran, Communications Officer at the
Bat Conservation Trust.




Posted by Bat Conservation Trust at 08:33 No comments:

Labels: action for wildlife, bat, Bat Conservation Trust, bat detector, bat
walk, biodiversity, conservation, education, event, magical, noctule, talks,
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