David's Bat Blog

Navigate that bat!

2012-01-21T17:52:00.001Z

This is an exciting time for bat survey technology: after a number of years of stagnation the equioment available for surveying bats is taking some serious leaps forward. A number of new pieces of equipment have appeared on the market over the past 18 months and several more will be available soon. But sometimes it's not the equipment that matters so much as how you use it.

I have been using Anabats extensively for a number of years, both for passive monitoring (automatic recording of bats in flight) and for transect surveys(walking or driving a survey route, recording bat activity). The Anabat's ability to be connected to a GPS unit to record grid reference data alongside recorded bat passes is especially useful in understanding bat activity as you can plot the location of each bat pass accurately on a map. However, this tends to take a bit of post-survey work (unless you use a personal computer with your Anabat/GPS combination...but madness lies that way if you're not an uber-geek).

The flexibility and potential of Anabats for generating extensive high quality data has led them to move out of the realm of the professional bat ecologist and into the hands of voluntary bat groups around the UK. They're not cheap at around £1400 each, but many enterprising bat groups have obtained funding and are using their Anabats to great effect, generating lots of new biological records of bats.

A Bat-Nav in place on an Anabat SD1. In practice I found that the magnet wasn't sufficiently powerful to hold it in place (photo copyright Wildwood Ecology)

Recently I came across a new gadget, designed to be used in conjunction with an Anabat. In essence Wildwood Ecology's Bat-Nav acts as a GPS plugged into your Anabat and feeds it grid references as you walk or drive around. It comes with a simple but effective computer Widget, which uses Excel to extract your bat records and GPS file and generate a KML file. This file allows you to see your bat records plotted on Google Earth with a miniumum of fuss.

The Bat-Nav is designed to be used with an Anabat SD2 and draws its power supply from the USB socket on the machine. As I only had an older SD1 available for testing Wildwood kindly rigged up a wire to connect to the positive side of the battery pack, which worked ok. Since then Wildwood have launched a model designed to be used with an SD1.

To test the Bat-Nav in practice I used it to do a car-based survey around my home village one night in September. Wildwood suggest the unit can be attached by it's own magnet to the Anabat's own steel casing. I found the magnet too weak for that, but it stuck to the car door very well.

I recorded plenty of bats during a 2 hour drive. When I got home I used AnalookW to identify and label each bat call and created a count labels file in the usual way (if you've never used AnalookW, it is a delightfully easy to use piece of software for identifying bat calls which, with a few clicks allows you to create a simple spreadsheet). I then opened the data in the BatNav KML generator (see above) and after half a dozen clicks I had a KML file. All I had to do was click on the file for it to open in Google Earth (you probably have to have Google Earth already installed) and here is the result.

The transect route is shown as a yellow line, with each bat pass labelled (I chose to label P5 for Soprano Pipistrelle, P4 for Common Pipistrelle, Psp for unidentified Pipistrelle and Msp for Myotis). For anyone with access to GIS software (and the training to use it) this kind of thing is easily prepared, though it takes a little time. If you don't have acces to GIS or want a quick and simple way of looking at your bat data geospacially, this fits the bill. You can also manipulate the data three-dimensionally in Google earth and even look at it in Google Streetview, as you can see below.

Would I buy one? I think I would, though it's not without drawbacks. The area I chose for my test survey is in open farmland and the terrain is clear to see from the air. A woodland transect would be far less clear, with the tree canopy tending to hide paths and some roads and structures. Sadly Google Earth does not (so far as I know) allow you to convert between the satellite view and a decent map view (for that you need Bing.com/maps, which allows you to use Ordnance Survey maps as well as satellite images. Unfortunately it's part of Microsoft's evil empire, but these are the breaks).

Another niggle is that the magnet is disappointingly feeble, making it less usable for walked transects, but some sticky-backed velcro would probably sort that out.

Of course £150 is rather a lot of cash to shell out, especially if you already have a GPS receiver you could use. A friend of mine said it just took him a couple of hours, playing with Excel and Google Earth, to work out how to produce his own KML files. But he's a bit of a geek (sorry Tom). Perhaps Wildwood should consider selling the KML generator widget separately from the magnetic GPS - they may find some customers who are already happily using a normal GPS with their Anabat, but would like the hassle-free conversion to KML.

Wildwood Ecology - www.wildwoodecology.com

My website - www.plecotus.co.uk

Send me your thoughts/comments - email David Dodds

A major threat to biological recording

2012-01-14T16:11:00.001Z

If there is one thing which underpins all wildlife conservation work it is biological records. Data on what species live where allows us to understand wildlife better and to plan how best to conserve it. Without biological records we are simply groping in the dark.

A major weakness of professional ecology in the UK (and to some extent amateur natural history) are field skills: the ability to accurately identify species and habitats in the field and record their presence. Universities are churning out ecology graduates who in many cases have spent only a week or two in the field during 3 or 4 years of study. The result is a glut of graduates, but a shortage of graduates who are able to do fieldwork without extensive further training.

Many people turn to postgraduate study in order to address this and by far the best course has for a number of years been the University Certificate, Postgraduate Diploma and MSc courses in Biological Recording run by Dr Sarah Whilde's team from the University of Birmingham, based at the Gateway Centre in Shrewsbury.

Unlike most other courses, these are ideal for those who already work full time and offer enormous choice of species groups to work with. Individual modules are run intensively over 3-5 days at Field Studies Council centres around the country by expert specialists. I was fortunate to study the MSc course and gained enormous benefit as well as great deal of pleasure.

Now these successful courses are under threat. The University of Birmingham took the astonishing decision to close the centre. This is not for financial reasons, in fact they admit that the courses make a strong financial contribution to the university. They wish to close them simply because they do not fit with current research goals at the university. Quite apart from the barking mad concept of a publicly-funded body throwing away a good source of income, the closure of these courses would be enormously damaging to the quality of ecological surveying and biological recording in this country.

After massive pressure the university have conceded that they will attempt to move the courses to another university, but they have made no promises.

Please take a moment to sign the on-line petition against this move and help persuade the university that these courses are too important to conservation and to wildlife education for them to be threatened in this way.

Biological recording petition

There's Nowt So Queer As Folk...

2012-01-08T15:14:00.004Z

...whom you meet on bat surveys.

Back in May 2008 I wrote about some strange occurrences during bat surveys (What is it about bat surveys? May 2008). It sometimes seems inevitable that if you meet someone during a survey, there will be something less than normal about them or their activities. I thought it was time to update you with a few of the odd characters I have met and strange situations I have found myself in since then.

Sometimes you meet regular-seeming people, who turn out to have a secret. I was recently setting up a survey in a rural area when a farmer stopped to ask if we needed any help. You know you're in a properly rural area when strangers offer help without being asked - antisocial city dwellers please note. I explained to him that we were doing a vehicle survey for bats, showed him the equipment we use and we chatted for a while about bats and wildlife. Like most farmers he was highly aware of the wildlife around his farm. He described the bats he sees around his farmyard and invited me to drive through after the survey and take a look. Having a bit of time to spare later I drove through his farmyard and bats weren't all I saw. Perhaps he had intended to draw the curtains on the room that contained his cannabis-growing operation but was distracted by some livestock emergency...

Meeting the police during bat surveys is a fairly regular occurrence during surveys. If we are doing something liable to look suspicious I used to call the local station and let them know, to avoid wasting their time with an unnecessary visit. These days the local cop-shop is probably unmanned at night and I object to spending half an hour talking slowly to a disinterested call centre person who usually fails to advise the local patrol of our presence anyway. So explaining to bored coppers what we are doing is a regular thing.

Whilst carrying out a dawn survey close to an international airport I had a less run-of-the-mill encounter with some less run-of-the-mill police Officers. During the survey I heard shots fired in the near distance. "Bird scaring at the airport", I thought and carried on undaunted. A little while later, as I was leaving I saw a police car approaching at some speed. Apart from the everyday odd behaviour native to all bat workers I was probably looking especially suspicious. The site I was surveying was a building within a massive security fence. It was just a couple of hundred metres from the main runway of the airport, so just the sort of place your average terrorist might find alluring. And here I was, desperately trying to disguise the fact that I was placing the key to this high security compound under a brick beside the gate (my client's idea and not one I was in a hurry to take the credit for with the boys in blue).

The police car did a rather impressive screechy-wheel stop across the road, matched a moment later by another one. All very interesting...until machine-gun toting airport police leaped out, fanned round me and told me to keep my hands where they could see them. You never really know what you're going to do when placed in a dramatic situation, but my brain was whirling with three slightly worrying facts: these guys clearly mean business, in a moment they are going to ask me to explain my highly suspicious behaviour and my answer is going to involve furry flying animals...

It turned out that, whilst I may look suspicious, I don't look at all threatening (which was actually a bit disappointing). Apparently I had been right about the shots, but someone else had heard and reported them, giving Starsky and his mates an opportunity to go play. The really odd sequel was when, having finished with me, one of them asked me to wait as "the Chief Super wants a word with you". After a few minutes a much sleeker police car arrived and out climbed someone whose uniform had a lot more shiny bits on. This is where things took a surreal turn. It was 5am, I was utterly knackered, having been up since 1am and I had just been held at gunpoint. "They all think this is funny" he said, indicating the now grinning coppers "but I've just been appointed to take over the wildlife crime unit. Do you have time for a chat about wildlife crime priorities?" "Errr...ok". That was a very unusual morning.

On another occasion a police patrol stopped, to enquire if everything was ok, as our car, with an amber flashing beacon on the roof and reflective "surveying" sign on the back was stopped at a slewed angle in the middle of the A7 trunk road late at night. I really didn't have the nerve to tell them the truth: that we were looking for Noctule bats, which are quite rare in the Scottish Borders and I had piled on the brakes and leaped out of the car because we heard one. Not quite a Highway Code manoeuvre!

A couple of years ago I was asked to carry out bat surveys of a large number of primary schools in which it was planned to do extensive work so the local council needed to confirm that no bats were present (owing to their legal status as European Protected Species). The first stage of such surveys is usually a site visit, to check the buildings internally and externally for signs of bats and bat roosts. The schools were supposed to be advised when I was coming but, usually weren't. So, when I walked towards the entrance of one particular school I took a deep breath and steeled myself for the usual protracted explanation about bats, bat surveys, why one was necessary etc before being allowed past the Fort Knox security system that all schools seem to have.

To my surprise I was greeted with "Ooh bats, come in, come in!". "Wow", I thought. "This is unusual." I was ushered inside and pointed out to a passing teacher with "This gentleman has come about the bat." "Oh lovely!" was the response. By this point I was thinking something was a little odd. Not only were they unusually excited about a simple survey visit but they were talking about "the bat." Singular.

I was ushered up to a noticeboard covered in drawings of bats, paintings of bats, essays about bats etc. Alongside was a photograph of a Long-eared Bat and pages from the Bat Conservation Trust (BCT) and other bat-related websites. "I've died and landed in bat conservation heaven." I thought. The photograph was of a bat which had been found above the main entrance of the school the previous week. At first I was delighted. To see a school taking such a positive interest in bat conservation is unusual and fantastic. Bats suffer a great deal of prejudice and the best way to stamp out prejudice is to start with children. Then I thought about the bat.

The bat had been found in an exposed place on the outside wall of the school, within a few inches of an entrance used several times a day by a couple of hundred children. It apparently stayed there for two days before it "decided to leave". Whether this animal had been sick, injured or exhausted isn't clear but it certainly wouldn't have chosen to stay there for two days, being stared at by lots of people if it had an alternative option. I doubt very much that it "decided to leave". Perhaps it was eaten by a Magpie or other predator or perhaps it fell from the wall, to be picked up by a passing cat. Whatever happened could have been prevented, if someone had stopped to think "is this wild animal behaving naturally" and sought advice from BCT or the SSPCA. I suspect the kids who had researched the bat, drawn paintings of it and created a display about it would be rather upset if they learned that, whilst they were doing this, it was starving to death or being eaten.

A photo of the school bat, taken by a parent and enthusiastically bluetoothed to me from her phone.

Annoyingly we did a load of night-time surveys in the hope of finding a roost on the premises and never found any evidence. Wherever it came from, it wasn't the school.

If you find a bat and need help, advice or information contact the BCT Bat Helpline: http://www.bats.org.uk/pages/help.html

If you find a strange human or inquisitive copper during a bat survey...you're on your own.

My website: plecotus.co.uk

A Weekend With Engelbat

2011-09-08T18:43:00.004+01:00

I once worked on a bat project with someone whose sense of humour was completely absent. Anyone who knows me will tell you that my sense of humour is ever-present and decidedly peculiar, so things would always be a little difficult! This person was adamant that individual bats should never be given names as it anthropomorphises them, though in my view giving something a name simply labels it and is harmless (it is poor interpretation of behaviour that anthropomorphises a wild animal). The result of this difference of opinion is that, in honour of the humourless one, any bat which passes through my hands is immediately given a ludicrous name. This is how Engelbat (Engelbat Humperdink? Geddit? No? See what I mean?) came to be named.

He was a juvenile Brown Long-eared Bat (Plecotus auritus), found one July morning on the ground floor of a large country house. The house has a known BLE maternity roost in the attic, four stories above, but Engelbat had wandered quite some distance from there and looked rather sorry for himself, covered in cobwebs and tucked under a radiator.

I had no way of knowing why he had left the roost. This site has no history of bats straying into the building. It's possible his mother had died, causing him to become dehydrated and leave the roost in search of water. However, as he was old enough to fly it is perhaps more likely that he got separated from his mother and simply ended up in the wrong place. I often explain to roost owners that young bats are just as likely to do something silly as young humans.

A close-up of Engelbat's wing, showing the clear patches (unossified bone) in his joints which indicate a juvenile.

I don't normally get involved in bat rehabilitation work. It's a difficult, skilled and phenomenally time-consuming job, so I normally pass casualty bats on to those dedicated individuals who excel in it (hats off to Tracey, Carol and Nigel!). However, Engelbat was a bit different in that he was several weeks old and capable of flight. he just needed some TLC and a plan to get him back into the company of his mother.

Having given him a drink of water (always the number one priority with a casualty bat - they can go a few days without food, but dehydration is a swift killer) I checked Engelbat over for signs of injury and found none. I then took him home and installed him in the bat-cage. This is simply a small plastic cage of the type used to transport hamsters etc. Inside is a shallow water-bowl, a glass jar of warm water with a towel wrapped round it (to simulate his mother) and a canvas pouch hanging on one site, to allow him to retreat out of site into a simulated crevice. He quickly grabbed onto the warm sock and settled down and I left him to get used to his new surroundings. Later he left the sock and took a drink from the bowl, before moving up into the canvas pouch: all positive signs.

Engelbat with the warm sock which acted as a mother/colony substitute.

A while later Isla and I got him out of the cage to feed and assess him. He had done a couple of droppings in the cage, indicating that his digestive system was functioning. When offered a mealworm he grabbed it with enthusiasm, but had some difficulty chewing it, a bit like a small child given a hard toffee. Mealworms are the standard food source for casualty bats, but for younger animals their tough outer skins are a bit too chewy. We tried him on "white" mealworms, i.e. those which have recently shed their skins and have not properly hardened. He found these easier, but still struggled, so from then on we fed him mostly mealworm innards. This is a delightful meal to prepare. First slice the head off a mealworm, then squeeze out its insides as though its a tube of toothpaste. The resulting blobs of vile gunk were voraciously devoured. He prove to be a slightly aggressive little bat, using his forearms to "stamp" at anyone who came too close. Male Brown Long-eareds have a reputation for being grumpy when handled and he fitted that stereotype quite well!

A brief video of Engelbat slowly munching his way through a white mealworm.

So far he ticked a lot of the boxes for being capable of rapid release: no injuries, functioning digestive system, eating and drinking well, so the final test was could he fly? He quickly demonstrated he could by flying happily round and round the living room. Brown Long-eareds are slow-flying bats, so the restricted space didn't seem to faze him at all and eventually he astonished us by managing to land and somehow grip a smooth painted wall, which I'd never seen a bat do before. Several more flights were managed with aplomb.

As he was clearly a competent flier for his age that led us towards how to restore him to his colony. Placing stray infants back into roosts is a questionable approach, as it is impossible to know whether the animals mother is still within the colony, or whether the juveniles wandering may be due to her death, for example killed by a predator. If this were the case then returning the juvenile to the roost may not be the best way forward.

After a conversation with Tracey Joliffe (a very experienced bat carer) for a second opinion, we took Engelbat back to the roost at sunset and placed him on a wooden bench which the adults fly over on their way to their feeding grounds. Our expectation was that his mother would encounter him and encourage him to fly with her. As it happened he chose to fly on his own and flew very competently along the flight line used by the colony, into the nearby woodland.

Of course it's impossible to tell the outcome of a casualty bat returned to the wild (unless you are Maggie Brown, who has done some amazing work tracking her casualties post-release, to evaluate their success). Hopefully he fed successfully and returned to the roost with the rest of the colony and hopefully he teamed up with his mother, if she was still alive. We'll never know for certain. Now I have to think up another ridiculous bat name, ready for the next bat who comes to stay...

If you're interested in caring for sick, injured or orphaned bats the best starting point is to speak to an existing bat carer, who can mentor you and help you get going. It's easy to get things wrong and sound advice and support is essential if you want to get it right. Contact your local bat group to find out who does bat care in your area. You can find your local group via the BCT website (and if you're not already a member...join!) . Another great source of information is the "Bat Rescue Manual", published by the West Yorkshire Bat Hospital, who also publish a regular newsletter: "Bat Care News". Your local bat carer will be able to put you in touch.

BCT Website: BCT Bat Groups page

My website David Dodds Ecology

Anabats and Songmeters

2011-08-18T12:13:00.001+01:00

I have written before about my good opinion of the Anabat SD1 (now replaced by the SD2, with some minor upgrades), a machine which offered huge advances in passive monitoring of bats (i.e. leaving a machine on site to continuously record bat calls), in use with a GPS receiver for walked and car transects (where a route is followed, recording bat calls and their locations) and for use as a training aid when connected to a PDA personal computer, to display live sonograms of bat calls. Prior to the arrival of the Anabat the only way of doing these surveys was with a Frequency Division bat detector, recording WAV (or poorer MP3) audio files: a massively time-consuming and data intensive process, so the Anabat was a big step forward.

Like all good things, the Anabat had some downsides: reliability has never been as good as it might be, technical support is patchy and confusing and the price (around £1400) is prohibitive for many users. So the arrival of the rival Songmeter SM2 on the UK market last year generated a lot of interest. At around £800 it is clearly cheaper and many bat workers and ecologists were excited to try out the latest generation of bat detector. Personally, I was quite cynical and, having had the chance to use several Songmeters this year, my reservations may have been justified. Let me clear though: I am not saying that the SM2 is not a good piece of equipment: it has a lot going for it. What I am saying is that, just like the Anabat, it has strengths and weaknesses and to claim as some have, that it is a technical advance on the Anabat is simply nonsense!

The two importers of the Songmeter, Alana Ecology and Envisage Wildcare have marketed the Songmeter powerfully in the U.K. and it's arrival on the market suggested that it was a new and exciting development. In fact the Songmeter had been on the market in the U.S., alongside the Anabat for quite some time. Anabat had been successfully sold in the U.K. by both companies for several years and both provided excellent technical support. In early 2010 Titley Electronics (who make the Anabat) suddenly withdrew the product from them and set up a European sales office in the U.K. Deprived of a key part of their product ranges, both companies looked around for a replacement product and settled on the Songmeter. So it's arrival here was a result of commercial necessity, rather than technical development and the flurry of interest in it is primarily a result of marketing hype. So I was interested to get my hands on some Songmeters this year and find out how they match up to the hype.

An Anabat SD1. The later SD2 version has a USB socket on the right-hand side, rather than a serial port. The velcro on the left was stuck on to allow a GPS receiver to be attached for transect work.

A key advantage of the Anabat is the fact that it converts bat call audio to a digital format, so that each bat pass generates a tiny file of around 2-5KB. Thus a 2GB memory card can last weeks or even months, without needing to be replaced. The SM2 records WAV high quality audio, compressed to form WAC files. Theoretically, this allows the creation of better quality sonograms for analysis. Unfortunately, the compression results in very large files, compared to Anabat. My experience of using SM2 has been of long hours spent downloading, copying and converting many tens of Gigabytes of data. The Songscope software supplied by Wildlife Acoustics (the makers of Songmeter) is expensive and unpopular, so that most people use Analook (the Anabat software) to analyse Songmeter data. Wildlife Acoustics supply a free program (WAC2WAV) which converts WAC files to ZCA format, so they can be analysed using Analook. However, running WAC2WAV on large amounts of data (and most passive monitoring produces large amounts of data) is slow and tiresome.

Using Anabats for passive monitoring has always created the problem of waterproofing, leading to many imaginative ways of keeping Anabats dry and free from condensation when used in the field. Unfortunately, long-term use in our wet Scottish climate has always been a problem, with inevitable condensation build-up leading to failure if the machines aren't occasionally taken somwhere warm, to dry out for a few days. The SM2 case is waterproof in itself and needs no further protection. It also addresses the Anabat problems by including "Humisorb" pouches inside the units and having a valve to equalise air pressure inside with that outside. That sounds ideal and would be...if it worked. At present several of the SM2s I am using have proved unequal to the challenge of a cold, wet upland site, with quantities of condensation present inside the machines. In fairness, none has yet stopped working and the manufacturers have proved keen to find a solution. Only time will tell if they are successful.

There is a clear cost benefit in buying an SM2, rather than an Anabat, but there are also hidden costs. A 2GB CF card for an Anabat costs around £15, but a set of four 32GB SD cards for an SM2 could set you back several hundred pounds (how many you need will depend on how often you download data). SM2s have internal capacity for a set of outdated D size batteries. The machines reportedly do not respond well to the lower voltage produced by rechargeable batteries. Happily the machine, like the Anabat, will work with an external Sealed Lead Acid Battery. Unlike the Anabat, you will have to pay around £100 for an external voltage regualator. Oh, and if you want the software designed to be used with the Songmeter, that will be another £500.

Probably my biggest beef with Songmeter is its lack of flexibility. It is a passive monitoring machine. Full stop. Anabat has a range of potential uses, as I described above. The SM2 does have some interesting potential though. For example, it comes with an in-built temperature recording unit. It also has the ability to work with two separate microphones concurrently. Potentially, this allows some interesting studies to be carried out, using extension microphone cables. For example, recording the direction of bat movement along a linear feature such as a hedgerow or comparative studies of bat activity at ground level and at height.

A Songmeter SM2 in position, attached to a post. This unit is being operated with two microphones simultaneously.

Another intersting feature of the Songmeter is it's omnidirectional microphones, which pick up bats in all directions. This is potentially a useful feature in a passive monitoring machine. When a detector is used in the hand we tend to point it at bats we hear, getting the clearest possible calls. When a detector is used passively the directionality of the microphone works against us, so an omnidirectional microphone seems a good idea. However, it has drawbacks too. A microphone which picks up bat calls in all directions also picks up background noise from all directions too, reducing the gap between noise and bat calls. This could easily reduce the clarity of a recording and increase the number of non-bat ultrasound recordings.

My biggest beef with the Anabat has always been it's limited ability to keep accurate time. Over a period of weeks they are fine, but over protracted periods of use the internal clocks tend to lose or gain time. So far the SM2s I have been using have been reliable in that respect. They also have a useful ability to be set to start and stop recording at specified periods before sunset/after dawn, rather than specified start/finish times, as with the Anabat. This saves having to reprogram them through the year, to reflect changing dawn and sunset times.

One colleague I spoke to this year was hopeful that using SM2s intead of Anabats might reduce the number of equipment failures. Sadly that hasn't been my experience. It's easy to think that, when you buy a machine with a high price tag you are getting high quality electronics, but electronic development doesn't really work that way. The major cost in producing any electronic equipment is the initial development cost. If you are developing a new iPod, confidently expecting to sell millions of units, you can afford to invest millions of pounds in perfecting the design. If you are developing a bat detector, with an expected sale of a few thousand units then the development budget is inevitably much smaller. In this respect both machines are in the same boat and they appear to have an equal propensity to fail.

So what would I spend my cash on? Well, the SM2 is an interesting piece of equipment, with some useful features. It had the potential to knock the Anabat for six on waterproofing and reliability, but so far it has proved no better on either score. It lacks the Anabat's flexibility and it's memory-hungry format is time-consuming to manage. So, unless I was involved in a project which could benefit from the specific extra capabilities of the Songmeter I would spend my hard-earned cash on an Anabat.

Wildlife Acoustics (maker of the Songmeter) www.wildlifeacoustics.com

Titley Electronics (maker of the Anabat)

www.titley-scientific.com

Wildcare & Alana (the UK Songmeter importers) http://www.wildcareshop.com
http://www.alanaecology.com

My website: www.plecotus.co.uk

Realities of bat conservation in Malta

2011-03-10T15:11:00.013Z

As a wildlife conservationist with an especial interest in bats, I sometimes despair of the state of conservation in Britain and the prospects for the future of biodiversity. Cut-backs in conservation spending, prioritisation of projects that engage people, rather than those with real impact, the near-impossible task of enforcing wildlife law are all sources of frustration. Whilst these problems are all very real, they were put in context for me last year, when I spent some time working with bats on the Maltese Islands.

Malta is of course, part of the European Union and therefore bats and their roosts have the same legal protection, as elsewhere in Europe. However, Malta is a small country and pressures on wildlife are magnified by problems of scale, as well as by social issues.

I was lucky enough to spend time with Dr. John Borg, Director of the Malta Natural History Museum in Mdina. John is an energetic and ornithologist and bat-worker, who faces monumental difficulties and yet still works relentlessly to promote conservation. Malta, like several other Mediterranean islands, has a strong culture of shooting and trapping migratory birds. Though now curbed by European legislation, this is still a very real problem in Malta and it affects bats too, as they are used for target practice as they emerge from the roosts at sunset.

John Borg with a Maghrebian Mouse-eared Bat

When I was there the sound of gunfire was a constant backdrop, away from the towns. Hunters take their shooting heritage very seriously and John's work as a bird-ringer has brought him into conflict with them. Whatever our problems in the UK, we don't face the kind of intimidation John faces. He has had his car set alight, his tyres slashed and lights smashed and has even had a hole punched in the driver's door by a shotgun blast! To emphasise the point, when we were leaving a bat cave we had to leave quickly, as the trees above our heads were shredded by apparently deliberate shotgun fire.

A typical Maltese bird-shooter's hide. The island is littered with these structures.

The small size of the islands and their growing population creates massive development pressure, and the Maltese Environmental Protection Agency (MEPA) are very active in enforcing the law. Nonetheless, bat roosts are heavily pressured, especially underground sites, as the size of the islands makes the limestone caves used by Maghrebian Mouse-eared Bats (Myotis punicus), Grey Long-eared bats (Plecotus auritus) and Lesser Horseshoe Bats (Hipposideros hipposideros) often well-known and threatened by human activity.

I visited two of the biggest maternity colonies of Maghrebian Mouse-eareds, neither of which showed any signs of being used by the species any longer. Ghar Hasan is an extensive cave on the cliffs at the south east coast of Malta. It is a popular attraction and, as well as being visited by tourists, the litter within showed it is also used by the seedier end of humanity. In order to protect the bat colony, John Borg paid for a gate to be installed on the section of the cave used by the bats. When we visited part of the gate had been ripped away. John showed me where, in previous years there had been a large heap of bat droppings. Now there is nothing.

The vandalised bat gate at Ghar Hasan

Another formerly prolific maternity cave was Ghar il-Friefet, on the outskirts of the town of Birzebugga. When a new road was built over the cave attempts were made to safeguard the bats by gating it. Today this gate lies alongside a hairdresser's salon and the cave is no longer used by bats. The road surface was less than three metres above the cave roof and John described how the bats would take flight every time a truck drove overhead.

The bat gate at Ghar il-friefet - sadly a lost cause.

I wouldn't want to leave you with the impression that wildlife conservation is a lost cause in Malta. Alongside John's efforts, Birdlife Malta are an extremely active conservation organisation, who are making a real impact. Also, MEPA have a deliciously hands-on approach to dealing with planning violations (often the hands are on the controls of a bulldozer), from which our SNCOs and local authorities could learn a lot.

One of the most poignant moments of my visit to the island was when I spent some time with a group of undergraduates at the University of Malta, teaching them how to use bat detectors. Their enthusiasm and commitment to wildlife conservation was little short of inspiring and if they are the future of Maltese wildlife conservation the game ain't over yet.

Discussing bat detectors with a group of students from the University of Malta - the bright future of Maltese conservation

My website: www.plecotus.co.uk

MEPA: www.mepa.org.mt

Birdlife Malta: www.birdlifemalta.org

Swarming bats and shivering bat workers

2011-03-10T12:01:00.007Z

Last September I spent a night outside a disused lead mine, with fellow bat-workers from Lothians Bat Group and Dumfries and Galloway Bat Group. Our goal was to find out whether any autumn swarming activity took place and to catch any swarming bats and examine them for ectoparasites. As a licensed trainer I would also use this as a opportunity for bat license trainees to gain some experience handling bats.

The site was high in the hills of Dumfriesshire and as the sun went down it was a beautiful, calm evening. The mine had two access points: a ventilator on the hill above us and an addit (a horizontal shaft) leading into the mine. We blocked the ventilator with rubble netting, to ensure that any bats inside the mine would leave by the main entrance and set up my harp trap across the addit (see "The Kitchen Table Harp Trap", Feb. 2008 and "Happy Harp Trapping", August 2008).

The harp trap in place across the mine entrance, with rubble netting at the sides and below, to prevent bats from flying round the trap.

Our hope was to find that the mine might be used by Myotis bats (which in Scotland means Daubenton's, Natterer's and Whiskered) as a swarming site. It has suitable characteristics to be used as a winter hibernaculum and swarming bats had been recorded there the previous autumn. Myotis bats tend to gather in the middle of the night during August, September and October and fly together. It's not clear why they do this, but mating is probably involved, as males tend to remain around the sites and females commute in from surrounding areas. It may also be connected with checking access to a hibernaculum or showing the site to juveniles. John Altringham's team at Leeds University have been researching this for some time, revealing some fascinating insights (see "Untold riches of swarming bats", April 2008).

Soon after sunset a bat flew into the trap from within the mine. It was an adult male Daubenton's Bat (Myotis daubentonii). Sadly (for me, not the bat) it had no ectoparasites, but provided good handling experience for two trainees. This was fortunate as it turned out to be the only bat that we caught...

The adult male Daubenton's Bat we caught, before the temperature dropped.

As autumn swarming is an all-night activity we started the evening sitting around in folding chairs, for all the world like a group of picnickers, with positive thoughts about spending the entire night there. Then it started to get colder....and colder. Soon it seemed like a good idea to erect the gazebo someone had brought. Then we added the side walls. Then the sleeping bags and blankets came out!

Dr Stuart Smith demonstrates the right equipment for bat-work in sub-zero temperatures.

Common sense told us we should give up. After all, with the thermometer at just 2 degrees there wouldn't be any bat activity would there? Actually, yes there was. Two bats had been swarming around the front of the mine fairly continuously since not long after the Daubenton's was caught and released, but were not tempted into the trap. From the bat detector we could see they were Myotis and their relatively faint calls made me suspect they may be Natterer's Bats (Myotis nattereri), but without catching them we couldn't be sure. Possibly they were males, awaiting females arriving from elsewhere. If so then they were destined to be disappointed...as were we!

Eventually, after many hours, when the thermometer descended below zero we concluded that the female bats had more sense than us, or the males, and had stayed home! We packed up and followed their lead. The next day I tuned in to the TV weather forecast in time to hear the forecaster say that the previous night was "the coldest September night for decades".

My website: www.plecotus.co.uk

Important note: In the UK (and other European countries) it is a criminal offence to catch, handle or disturb bats without a license issued by the relevant SNCO (Scottish Natural Heritage, Natural England etc).

A rant about problem bats

2010-09-08T16:21:00.003+01:00

Yes, it's true, there is such a thing as a problem bat roost. Regrettably once in a while a bat colony makes someone's life difficult through noise, smell, stray bats in living areas, phobias etc. A big part of the skills of competent bat-worker relate to communicating with people and trying to find solutions which allow bats and people to share a building in harmony.

Here in Scotland we have an excellent system of contract bat-workers (I am one), employed on a casual basis by Scottish Natural Heritage, who visit people with bat problems and work with them to try to identify solutions. We also have a streamlined licensing process for domestic properties, to allow problem bats to be appropriately and safely excluded after the breeding season is over (most problem roosts are maternity sites). As a result we should be able to avoid the negative publicity for bats which could result from unhappy people suffering bat problems without help or support...or can we?

In my opinion there are three problems with the system as it stands.

1. Only domestic premises are included. Shouldn't big business pay their way? Of course they should when they cause problems, but we're not necessarily talking about big business.

What about the small business, struggling to make any headroom in a difficult economic climate, such as the hotelier near Dumfries I recently met? He was at his wits end trying to keep his business afloat whilst a Soprano Pipistrelle colony made two of his bedrooms stink. Is it reasonable for him to have to pay several thousands pounds he doesn't have for a consultant to carry out surveys and deliver a mitigation solution under license?

What about the Primary School who recently hired me to help with the Soprano Pipistrelle colony which were turning up in classrooms all over the school, creating havoc? Shouldn't their budget be spent on books and teachers, rather than consultancy fees (heavily discounted, I have to say) and a heated bat box as licensed mitigation?

With SNH refusing to help in situations like these, the risk is that people will choose to find their own solutions, with disastrous results for bat conservation. The hotelier had already done exactly that.

2. Domestic licenses for exclusion are streamlined and supported by SNH... up to the point when the license is issued. At that point the householder is left with a license and a leaflet advising how to carry out an exclusion (admittedly an excellent leaflet). If there are any complications the license may state that a licensed bat-worker must be involved, but the support has stopped, so the householder is left to sort that out by themselves. Surely the point in the process when SNH supervision is at its most critical is the physical exclusion? This is the moment when it could all go horribly wrong due to misunderstanding or indifference on the part of the householder. And is it reasonable to expect the householder to track down a consultant and pay consultancy fees? Some bat groups do great work filling the gap here, but not all have the numbers to be able to do so.

3. Domestic licenses do not usually require mitigation to be put in place. This is perhaps not unreasonable. Expecting householders to spend many hundreds of pounds on a heated bat box is a sure way to ensure their neighbours quietly kill their bats, instead of seeking help and advice. However, I have now encountered several situations where a problem bat colony has been excluded, no mitigation has been put in place and the following year there is a call from another house nearby: we have simply moved the problem on.

Of course mitigation measures are rarely used immediately by bats, but if centrally funded mitigation measures were put in place the number of repeat problems would inevitably diminish.

This is a thorny subject, especially when there is a massive squeeze on government funding. But if bat conservation is to be best served a number of facts seem clear to me:

1. Incidences of problem bat roosts should be dealt with quickly and sympathetically, regardless of who they are causing a problem to. Beaver reintroductions in Germany succeeded precisely because of this sort of open and supportive approach.

2. If a funding stream were available (and that's a big "if") then mitigation measures at domestic exclusions could become a norm instead of a rarity, with direct positive results for bat conservation.

3. SNH support for problem bat roosts should be a start to finish process. What is the point in providing a fantastic service to bats and householders for half the process and then walking away, allowing all the good work to be wasted as the householder gets fed up and tells all their friends that she wishes she had simply blocked up the roost entrance and told no-one about it.

Of course it's easy for me to sit here and carp: I don't have the thankless task of balancing SNH's budget. But on my desk lies a copy of SNH's glossy quarterly magazine and I notice the teas and coffees at this weekend's National bat Conference are sponsored by Natural England. I'm grateful for both... but I can think of better ways of spending the money.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the UK and Europe all bats are protected from disturbance and attempting to exclude bats or otherwise disturbing them is a criminal offence.

If you have a bat colony in your home or premises and need help or advice (in the UK) contact the local office of the relevant statutory nature conservation organisation: Scottish Natural Heritage, Natural England, Countryside Council for Wales or Northern Ireland Environment and Heritage Service.

Help and advice can also be obtained free of charge from the Bat Conservation Trust bat helpline on 0845 1300 228.

My website: www.plecotus.co.uk

There are bat detectors...and there's the SSF Bat2

2010-09-06T21:36:00.009+01:00

For some time I have been wondering what the next steps in bat detector technology would be. For a while it looked as though it would be the long-awaited Bat Box Griffin: heterodyne, frequency division and time expansion in one unit, with in-built recording. That may well prove to be a world-beating piece of equipment, but it's launch has seen many delays (though in the 21st century it's nice to see a manufacturer which respects its customers enough to perfect a product before launching it...Microsoft Vista comes to mind).

Last year the Italian Dodoultra promised digital processing and many clever features. Possibly they were delivered but it really didn't matter as the detector was woefully poorly designed in terms of ergonomics and usability in the field. The Dodoultra's manufacturer ignored two simple facts of bat detector design: bats move around fast and they do it in the dark. Detectors need to be easy to use and swift to change function. The Dodo delivered neither and followed it's namesake.

So when I heard of a new detector from SSF in Germany with clever functionality I was cynical, to say the least. However I am a sucker for new toys and so 160 Euros was spent on a shiny new SSF Bat2. Note that price: 160 Euros, delivered from Germany is good value for a decent quality heterodyne detector. But the SSF2 isn't just a decent quality heterodyne detector, it turned out to be rather more than that.

If I were to ask what are the major drawbacks of using a heterodyne detector, compared to say and £1800 Anabat+PDA you might say these:

1. The hassle of tuning up and down in order to find bat calls.

2. The difficulty of identifying the peak frequency of a brief bat pass.

3. The risk of missing a bat because you're on the wrong frequency.

The Bat2 display shows the frequency the detector is tuned to, as you might expect. But it has three other displays. Firstly, there is a second frequency display, which shows the peak frequency of the bat call you are listening to. Hit one of the four buttons on the front of the detector and the detector jumps to that frequency (and unlike the Dodoultra, which also included this function, it works properly. The Dodo had a tendency to latch onto harmonics, instead of the main call). Pipistrelles and other frequency-critical calls can be swiftly tuned to peak, even during a brief pass.

All heterodyne detectors have the problem that they only receive a limited range of call frequencies at one time. How broad a range depends on the individual detector, but between 5 and 20 kHz is usual. Of course this means that, if you are tuned to 20kHz, listening to a Noctule and Greater Horseshoe flies past you are going to miss it. The Bat2 includes a small graph on it's display, showing the frequency range of the received call. In theory this means that you can see that Greater Horseshoe, though you would have to be walking about staring at the display, which means you're not going to see any bat behaviour and will probably trip over a tree root. Nonetheless it's a handy function.

The Bat2's tuning is controlled by up and down buttons on the front. If. like me, you like the thumbwheel tuning on the current generation of Bat Box detectors you may view this with the same suspicion that I did. It turned out to be surprisingly usable, even one-handed (as every chiropterologist knows, bat surveys require at least three hands). Cleverly, the detector has four user pre-set frequencies which can be jumped to by pressing a button, thus removing the tedious need to c=tune from one end of spectrum to the other.

All good stuff so far, so what's are the downsides? Well, apart from it only being a heterodyne detector (and surely that graph indicates that this machine must be processing frequency division internally? Couldn't it have an FD recording output?) the only complaints I have are very minor. The battery compartment is held shut with a small Phillips screw. Nice and secure, but hardly the game you want to be playing in the dark at 2am when the batteries run out.

My other niggle also relates to the batteries. It uses 4 AA batteries, which makes it a little heavier than other detectors which use 9volt PP3 batteries, but not enough to be a problem. I found that the battery indicator read low as soon as I inserted a fresh set of batteries. It took me a while to realise that rechargeable batteries only deliver 1.2volts, compared to the 1.5volts of a dry cell. Thus, the Bat2, when presented with rechargeable batteries registers low battery, regardless of the state of charge.

All in all I am delighted with my Bat2 and for the time being it is my detector of choice for watching bats, though for anything where I may need to review calls later I'll still use an Anabat+PDA or a Bat Box Duet and digital recorder. Please SSF...bring out a frequency division version...oh, and a handbook in English would be nice.

SSF website: www.all-about-bats.net

My website: www.plecotus.co.uk

WW2 Bunker to Bat Hibernaculum

2010-09-05T20:46:00.008+01:00

Several winters ago a couple of good friends and I were searching structures I had trawled from an archeaeological database, in the hope of finding previously unrecorded bat hibernaculum. A group of massive World War 2 structures had caught my eye on a satellite photograph. These turned out to be former RAF bomb stores - useless for hibernating bats, but now handy cattle sheds for a farmer.

Nearby a small square of concrete on a small hillock within a pasture field caught our eye. Taking a closer look, we found a small hole in the ground alongside the concrete square. When we crawled through the hole we found a hidden world. A group of brick-walled underground rooms formed an airfield defence bunker. The concrete square was a pill-box, allowing the commander a 360 degree view of the surrounding RAF airfield, now long gone.

The bunker was humid and seemed to have the sort of steady low temperature suitable for hibernating Myotis and Brown Long-eared Bats. Whilst it was full of historical interest, including an iron bedstead and a utility WC, sadly there were no crevices in the masonry which could be used by hibernating bats. Nonetheless, I couldn't help thinking it had potential and that fact was filed away in the tardis-like bucket of trivia which masquerades as my brain.

Fast forward two years to a conversation with Stuart McPherson of East Lothian Council and my randomly-wandering brain spat forth the news of this potential bat hibernaculum on his patch. We arranged to look at the site with the landowner and a plan was hatched. With a generous grant from Scottish Natural Heritage we would dig out the entrance to the bunker, to give bats easier access and to help them to find it. Inside we would install crevice boxes to facilitate hibernation and a hedge would be planted, linking the bunker to nearby woodland and hedgerows.

The difficult part was going to be the clearance of several tonnes of soil and rubble. "No problem" I blithely said, promising that Lothians Bat group would be able to produce a team of volunteers to take the work on (and provide funding in kind to balance the SNH grant). With my fingers firmly crossed I wondered how long it would take to do it on my own....

I needn't have worried. One August weekend found a team of 7 intrepid bat workers, equipped with spades, shovels, picks and buckets, together with a tractor and trailer provided by the landowner. I am here to tell you it is simply astonishing what a group of bat-centric conservationists can achieve when two and a half tonnes of spoil needs digging out and moving. As well as making the bunker far more accessible for both bat workers and bats we discovered all sorts of reminders of our 1940's forebears. The star find, considering this was an RAF base was an empty brylcreem bottle!

As ever, Nigel Terry went above and beyond the call of duty, splitting his trousers as he toiled and sweated. This blog can exclusively reveal the highly appropriate nature of what was revealed....

Words fail me!

My website: www.plecotus.co.uk

Bat Parasite Live Action!

2009-12-12T00:21:00.006Z

Some videos of live bat ectoparasites, recorded through a dissecting microscope at x40...

I used these at a workshop at the National Bat Conference in York earlier this year. It was fun watching people surrepitiously scratching!

My website: http://www.blogger.com/www.plectus.co.uk

What's in a city?

2009-12-03T21:39:00.012Z

In modern Britain we live in a man-made landscape. Whether you look at stone walls and sheep folds on a remote hillside in Sutherland, a leafy farmscape in Devon or a built-up part of south east England, man's handiwork is there to be seen, profoundly affecting the habitats available to our wildlife and of course, our bats.

I have always found it interesting to place wildlife within the landscape: where do they live? Where do they forage or hunt? How do they move through the landscape? Where are they present or absent? Where are they threatened by predators and where do they take refuge?

We are fortunate in the 21st century to have easy access to satellite photography free of charge, via websites such as Google Earth and Bing Maps, which allow us to explore this swiftly and with a nice glass of Merlot to hand!

I thought it might be interesting to look at a random square kilometre of a major city and see what habitats useful to bats would be apparent, using one of these websites.

Here is my square kilometre. Two things instantly spring out: this is very obviously a built up area, but there are clearly green places here. Are they just amenity grassland, or more structural habitats which might they offer hunting places for bats. And are they connected, allowing bats to move through the city?

Zooming in makes some of these habitats more apparent. Here, the classic suburban wildlife habitat displays it's strength. These gardens may be individually small, but together they form a block of habitat, with trees and shrubs providing potentially good foraging habitat for generalist species, such as Common Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) and Soprano Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus). In the south Soprano's tend to have a riparian affinity, but here in Scotland they are more numerous than the Commons and tend to use a wide variety of edge and suburban habitats.

Also in my square kilometre is another classic urban wildlife habitat: a cemetary. I recently carried out some bat surveys close to a large cemetery in East Kilbride and was delighted by the number of Foxes which emerged from it each night, to keep my survey team company. On one memorable evening two of us watched a young Fox edge up to within a few feet, grab a plastic bottle and run to a safe distance with it. Apparently unimpressed it then urinated on the bottle and stalked off!

This cemetery appears to enclose a lot of mature trees. These are likely to harbour plenty of insect prey for bats, especially if some of them are native species. Non-natives tend to be home to generalist invertebrates, but native species are also likely to offer a home to many more native invert species, for whom the tree provides more specialist niches.

Also in the square kilometre is what appears to be a public park, probably offering similar foraging habitat for bats (though not necessarily undisturbed conditions to allow Foxes to successfully breed!) So with a cemetery, a public park and plenty of mature gardens our city bats seem to be quite well-provided with foraging habitat. There are also plenty of houses and industrial buildings which seem likely to provide the potential for roosting Pips and some of the more mature trees could include holes and crevices for roosting bats too. The next question is how do the bats move between all the features? What commuting corridors are available to them?

Often lined with trees and shrubs, urban railways offer excellent wildlife corridors and this square kilometre has several. Here two cross each other and elsewhere a disused railway line has been developed into a cycleway. I'm sorry to revert to a foxy, rather than batty theme, but I was travelling on a train in Ealing which stopped at signals. Right outside the carriage window a vixen relaxed in the sun, whilst her three cubs played, completely unperturbed by the proximity of a trainload of disgruntled commuters!

Even better, within this square kilometre is the mother load: a stretch of canal. With trees, shrubs and hedges providing security for commuting bats and foraging opportunities for Soprano Pips, this is an excellent wildlife corridor. Emergent and submerged vegetation provides homes for plenty of invertebrate prey for Daubenton's Bats (Myotis daubentonii) and the smooth water is perfect for them to hunt over. Smooth water helps echolocating Daubies to pick up emergent insects on or just above the surface.

Canals without vegetation are not necessarily poor foraging places. A few years ago I surveyed the Union Canal with a team of volunteers, attempting to map foraging sites. To my surprise, the most active foraging sites were the ones with little or no vegetation, rather than those with plenty of vegetation and diverse prey species. These concrete-lined canal sections had large numbers of Chironomid midges hatching. They are amongst the first species to occupy stagnant water and the bats demonstrated that, as far as they were concerned, quantity trumped diversity!

The next time you encounter a bat, try using this method to look at the surrounding habitat. You may be surprised how much you can conclude about likely hunting locations, commuting routes and possible roost sites which the bats may use.

My website: http://www.plecotus.co.uk/

An Intrepid Batling

2009-07-19T18:38:00.006+01:00

Baby animals are amazing things: endowed by nature with astonishing resilience, combined with survival instincts.....

Sadly, when the two bats flew I didn't have the camera to hand and it was over very quickly, so you'll just have to take my word for the last part!

My website: http://www.plecotus.co.uk/

Contact me: http://www.blogger.com/blog@plecotus.co.uk

The Diffusion of Useful Knowledge

2009-06-27T14:24:00.005+01:00

Having a first degree in history I have always had an interest in how our understanding of bats has developed down the years (see "An 1892 bat-worker", January 2009). Today's post brought me a copy of "The Penny Magazine of the Society for the diffusion of useful knowledge", published on 7 January 1843.

My first thought was what a wonderful-sounding title and what a sign of the times that there existed a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The Victorian moneyed classes were incredible busy-bodies and loved trying to enhance people's lives, often in rather idiosyncratic ways. (Strangely, paying people enough to live on was rarely considered a way of enhancing lives!)

A regular feature of this paper is a series entitled "Curiosities of British Natural History" and this issue's feature is about bats. Sadly, the author's name is not given but it was either someone who knew the subject or who did a good deal of research as it contains several pages of detailed description of the subject.

Above the start is a gorgeous engraving, showing a Noctule, a Pipistrelle and a Long-eared Bat. The latter has a thoroughly cheesy grin on its face and the Noctule looks too portly to fly, but some of the anatomy is surprisingly detailed: presumably they were engraved from dead specimens.

The article begins with the enticing statement "It may surprise some of our readers to be informed that sixteen or seventeen distinct species of bats are natives of the British Isles". What?! That is our current understanding (depending on whether you include the Greater Mouse-eared or not). In 1843 the two Pipistrelles had not been separated, nor had Brandts and Whiskered Bats. The finding of Nathusius Pipistrelles in Britain was long in the future and, although it had been described elsewhere, I don't think the Grey Long-eared had been discovered in Britain at that time.

So what were the other four species? Unfortunately, the anonymous author doesn't tell us. In fact he only describes eight species, dismissing all the others as "extremely rare and restricted to certain localities". Was he guessing? Was he reading a foreign book and assuming the same species were here? Was he including some long-dismissed sub-species or perhaps bats found in part of the Empire? How frustrating!

The species he describes are: The Common Bat (Pipistrelle); The Great Bat (Noctule); The Long-eared Bat; The Barbastelle; The Reddish-grey Bat (Natterer's); the Whiskered Bat and the Greater and Lesser Horseshoe Bats. The obvious missing species is the Daubenton's, which must surely have been known at that time and would have been relatively easy to distinguish.

As with all writing of the era, wordsmithing was a priority and some of the descriptive text is fantastic: "Often during warm summer evenings have we seen numbers, perhaps several scores, of the Common Bat flitting over pools, in chase of gnats and similar insects, or gambolling with each other in a mazy dance, ever and anon uttering sharp shrill cries of exultation and delight..." The shill calls were presumably social calls, which are sometimes just within the range of human hearing. Incidentally, a score at that time was an innocent number twenty, in case you think the author was using dried bats for questionable purposes.

The piece includes a surprising amount of scientific detail, for example listing the species found to hibernate in caves as Natterer's, Whiskereds, Barbastelles and Long-eareds, though again Daubenton's are conspicuously absent (could it be they confused them with Natterer's at this time?). Given that this was a popular paper, not a scientific journal, there is a remarkable amount of detail: something today's press could learn from.

As with today's press however, the author just can't resist a lurid story and describes bats stealing bacon from chimneys and eating meat in larders. Not perhaps as daft as it sounds, in an era when bacon was hung in chimneys to cure and when meat was kept open in a larder. Houses would have been quite porous to bats at that time and I can imagine a stray Pipistrelle within a house, finding itself next to a joint of raw meat, having a nibble, possibly for the water content.

Something exciting about old texts like this is when they describe the location of bat roosts. The author mentions a Noctule roost under the eaves of Queen's College Cambridge and Greater Horseshoes occupying caves "at Clifton and in Kent's Hole, near Torquay". If anyone reading this lives in those areas, it would be fascinating to know if these sites are still occupied, 166 years later!

At the time this paper was produced, people were still grasping to understand how bats found their way in the dark, and, reading the author's description one gets a sense of his frustration: they knew there was something special about it, but couldn't quite put their finger on it:

"There is a singular property with which the bats is endowed, too remarkable and curious to be passed altogether unnoticed. The wings of these creatures consist, as we have seen, of a delicate and nearly naked membrane of vast amplitude considering the size of the body; but besides this, the nose is in some furnished with a membranous foliation, and in others the external membranous ears are enormously developed. Now these membranous tissues have their sensibility so high, that something like a new sense somehow accrues, as if in aid of that of sight. The modified impressions which the air in quiescence, or in motion, however slight, communicates; the tremulous jar of its currents, its temperature, the indescribable condition of such portions of air as are in contact with different bodies, are all apparently appreciated by the bat." So near, yet so far!

My website: http://www.plecotus.co.uk/
Feedback:mailto:blog@plecotus.co.uk

Alana or Envisage?

2009-06-27T13:44:00.003+01:00

For years Alana Ecology have been the benchmark supplier for wildlife survey equipment. They were never the cheapest supplier, but their catalogue always drew together kit from a huge range of manufacturers. It always seemed to include the very best equipment and this was coupled with excellent advice: if you called you always found yourself speaking with someone who actually understood what you needed and knew the best solution.

Not surprisingly, for me and for many other people who work with wildlife, both professionally and as a hobby Alana became the standard supplier for everything: a reliable source of advice and good kit.

Over the past couple of years there seems to have been a disappointing deterioration in the standard of service provided by Alana: late and missing deliveries; failure to keep the customer informed, failure to call back etc. After several instances of this kind of poor service I started looking around to see who else is out there and a colleague told me about Envisage Wildcare. Their catalogue isn't quite as comprehensive as Alana's (and irritatingly, you have to download it, you can't simply view it on the web), but most of the key equipment is there.

When I needed a new endoscope I decided to give Envisage Wildcare a try. I phoned at 4pm and spoke to someone who took my order. Pushing my luck, I asked if it would be possible to have it delivered the next day? "Erm, yes, but the van is arriving so I'll need to put the phone down now and run". That is the kind of service that attracts attention and true enough, next morning the endoscope arrived.

Since then, I have heard about several other examples of this kind of thoughtful, professional service, experienced by others. I do think that we would be best served by two good companies in competition: that way they keep each other up to the mark and keep prices low. Having heard a couple of people say recently that had gone elsewhere, I hope that Alana recognise and address their service. They have great expertise and I certainly haven't written them off.

If I were to send messages to both companies it would be this:
Alana - sort out your service, keep your customers informed about their orders and lose the complacency.
Envisage - keep doing what you're doing, but for heaven's sake set up a proper on-line shop, instead of the irritating pdf download.

Take a look and decide for yourself:
http://www.alanaecology.com/
http://www.envisage-wildcare.co.uk/

My website: http://www.plecotus.co.uk/

Noctules, Boxes and dangling bat-workers

2009-04-12T18:04:00.010+01:00

During 2007 and 2008 I spent some time on investigating the distribution of Noctules (Nyctalus noctula) in south-east Scotland, a region where the species was traditionally considered scarce and probably beyond it's natural range. I gathered together incidental records from many bat-workers (thanks!), some focussed car surveys and records from commercial bat surveys carried out by a number of consultants, including me.

The result was a clear indication that Noctules are widespread in the Borders and Lothians regions and probably at a greater density than was previously realised. The results were presented in a poster at the B.C.T. Scottish bat Conference in November 2008. If you're interested you can download a copy as a .PDF file here: http://www.plecotus.net/Noctule-poster.pdf (You are free to distribute this information, in the interests of bat conservation, but please attribute it)

One evening in September I was relaxing in the bar at Preston Montford Field Centre, near Shrewsbury during a training course. My phone made one of the irritating noises that mobiles make, to tell me I had received a text from Carol and Nigel, both active members of Lothians Bat Group. They attached a photo, with the tongue-in-cheek message "do you know what this is?!" You're probably ahead of me here - it was a Noctule, of course. To rub my nose in it, they had found it in a bat box at a country park 2 miles from my home. If I hadn't been on the course I would probably have been there when the boxes were checked. Grumpy wasn't the word for my response....

To their credit, Carol and Nigel had found the first ever Noctule in a bat box in Scotland and it resulted in some positive press coverage for bat conservation. Fast forward two weeks when I was checking bat boxes at another country park, also in Midlothian and believe it or not, there was another Noctule. Like Nigel and Carol's this was an adult female, squeezed into a slim bat box. She was a delight to handle: very relaxed, even when I placed her on a log to photograph her, before returning her to her box. She was also kind enough to give up some Spinturnix acuminatus mites (well, I was happy about it, even if my companions were a little taken aback).

To put this in context, these two animals were both found in boxes in a county where I can count previous records of Noctules in flight on my fingers. Was it coincidence (or was it the same bat, with a sense of humour?) or does this tie in with our new knowledge of the spread of Noctules? It was certainly a surprise in an area with many bat box schemes and two decades history of only ever finding Pipistrelles in them. By coincidence, in 2007 and 2008 a small colony of Natterer's Bats were found in a West Lothian bat box, so these Noctules seemed too good to be true.

Stuart Smith, chairman of Lothians Bat Group (and one of the grandees of Scottish bat-work), came up with an unusual plan to respond to these new records by installing some new bat boxes, higher than normal, something he had seen at a Vincent Wildlife Trust site in Dorset. Most bat boxes in the Lothians are between 12 and 20 feet (3.7-6.1m ) above ground. Noctules are tree-roosting bats, with a tendency to roost in tree holes, often high up, so higher boxes makes sense. The problem is that 20 feet is the maximum height for access by ladder, without extra safety measures and skills.

The solution? Suspended bat boxes! We used Schwegler woodcrete bat boxes, suspended from pulleys attached to high branches. Wire rope is used to pull the boxes up to full height -around 40-45 feet above ground (12.3-13.8m) - and tied off on bolts mounted on the tree trunk. These are at ladder height, to prevent the local "yoof" from reaching them. When we need to check and clean the boxes we will simply climb a ladder to normal height, unwind the wire rope from the bolts and lower the box to ground level. Once finished, we simply haul the box back to the top of the tree and tie off the wire rope once more. Ingenious!

Now, there is a chicken and egg problem here: how to get 40 feet up to mount the pulley? The Bat Group is lucky to have access to the services of a professional tree-climber, who also has an affinity for bats. George used his skills to climb the trees and install pulleys for us, making it look easy, as tree climbers always do. However, it's very hard work: you need to combine a high level of physical fitness with some somewhat counter-intuitive skills. Come to think of it, strolling about at the top of a tall tree as about as counter-intuitive as it's possible to be!

Watching a bat-box being hauled 40 feet into the top of a tree was quite exciting. Whether they will attract Noctules remains to be seen...

With work over for the day, George offered a couple of group members the opportunity to try out tree climbing techniques (at very low height) and so, trussed up and roped to the tree, we took our turns at making fools of ourselves. I had tried my hand at this in the past, so probably should have known better, but didn't.

An advantage of this being my blog is that you won't get to see my feeble attempt at tree climbing. However, this seems a good moment to wreak revenge on Carol for last year's Noctule text message. You have to hand it to her: she's enjoying herself, even if she isn't making much progress up the tree!

Any comments: blog@plecotus.co.uk

My website: http://plecotus.co.uk/

The Anabat PDA Bracket

2009-04-11T16:25:00.004+01:00

Last year I described a home-constructed bracket for attaching a PDA over the face of an Anabat SD1 bat detector (Ana...nother thing or two about the SD1, November 28 2008)

Although not as strong as the brackets sold by Titley Electronics, my bracket has the advantage that, if dropped during a survey, the bracket is likely to give way and protect the PDA and its precious data. It also cost roughly a 50th of the price of buying theirs, which is handy in the current economic climate.

Several people have contacted me to ask about the design. It's very simple, virtually "Blue Peter" construction, though without the sticky-backed plastic (I could never put that stuff on without bubbles anyway!)

For anyone who wants to try making one, I have put the details onto a .PDF file, accessible here: http://plecotus.net/Anabat-PDA-bracket.pdf

If you make one please let me know how you get on: mailto:blog@plecotus.co.uk

My website: http://www.blogger.com/www.plecotus.co.uk

An early spring...maybe?

2009-04-10T11:24:00.004+01:00

Last night I took a group of ecology undergraduates to a 200 year-old kirk (that's church to those without a Scottish education) in East Lothian, to watch for bats. I had my fingers firmly crossed on the way there: although I know the church and churchyard to have plenty of summer bat activity it is still very early in the season for bats to be at all dependable.

In the summer the kirk has a Soprano Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) maternity roost within the roof structure and also has Brown Long-eared Bats (Plecotus auritus) inside the kirk itself - during the summer there is usually a light scattering of droppings over the pews. Last year I watched one flying up and down inside the kirk, warming up before going out to forage.

The most I could really hope for was that there might be one or two individual Pipistrelles foraging around the kirkyard - it's in a secluded, tree-lined valley, alongside a burn (or stream if you prefer), so it's good foraging habitat, even this early in the season.

When we arrived and walked round there were no droppings inside the kirk, althought there were some on the exterior, making me hope that at least a few of the Pipistrelles may be present.

At sunset a few Soprano Pips overflew the kirk at first, commuting from other locations in the valley. Then there came an excited squawk over the radio, announcing that someone had seen a bat emerge from the edge of the kirk roof and we watched about 30 Sopranos emerge from the same spot where I watched several times that number come out in the autumn last year.

I am sure that there will be many more than 30 bats in that roost in mid summer, when Soprano Pipistrelle females gather in large numbers to rear their young - these are probably the first arrivals. Interestingly, we also heard a male Soprano in songflight, the string of mating calls designed to attract mates. This is primarily an autumn activity, but seems to occur a little in spring as well.

It's not hard to see why the bats are active so early in April. The chart below shows night-time temperatures at the Met Office's Gogarbank station, near Edinburgh. There have been two weeks of fairly consistent temperatures around 7 to 8 degrees, which seems to be the level at which bat activity in this area picks up. As a happy coincidence, last night was also the warmest night of the year so far.

However, this might not be the end of the story. It's still very early in the year and weather is never as reliable as we would like. As you can see below, last year April started off warm like this and then went into a cold period for a couple of weeks, causing bat activity to fall away until nearly the end of the month. Only time will tell what will happen this year.

My website: plecotus.co.uk
Contact me: mailto:blog@plecotus.co.uk

A Most Peculiar Hibernaculum

2009-02-28T22:44:00.005Z

Bats are very good at doing what they shouldn't do: ignoring the books and turning up in the wrong habitat or behaving in an unexpected way. That's part of the charm of working with them. There's a constant chess game in which we try to stay one step ahead.

Usually these unexpected things turn up one at a time and mercifully they are outnumbered by "correct" behaviour. Recently however, I have done some hibernation surveys at a site where the bats seem to specialise in intriguing behaviour.

The site is a tunnel about 500m long, accessed via a small hole, high in the hills of southern Scotland. The tunnel was hewn by hand from the solid rock, in order to carry water from one valley to the next, for industrial use. On end has long since collapsed, but the other is still accessible to those who know where it is. Despite it being far from habitat likely to be used by foraging bats, it seems to be well-known to bats and is regularly used by Daubenton's Bats (Myotis daubentonii) and Natterer's Bats (Myotis nattereri).

The tunnel is small, mostly just high enough for me to stand up in (I'm just over 6 feet tall) and between one and two metres wide. As there are few crevices, the bats tend to tuck themselves into angles in the rock, meaning that it possible to be fairly confident that the majority of bats will be seen during a methodical survey. This is a rare luxury: in many hibernation sites it can usually be assumed that, for every bat seen, there are likely to be more out of sight.

Because of this, I thought it would be interesting to place some temperature dataloggers within the tunnel, to measure the temperature variation at different depths. The dataloggers were in place for four weeks, during which there was a warm spell, followed by several days of very cold weather, accompanied by snowfalls. Despite this, a datalogger just 7m from the entrance (C on the chart) showed a temperature variation of less than one degree either side of 4.5 degrees. A second logger 100m from the entrance (B on the chart) showed a steady temperature of 6 degrees, never varying more than a tenth of a degree. A third logger another 100m in (A on the chart) showed similar consistency around 7 degrees. Hardly surprising then that the tunnel suits the bats well.

Water runs along the floor of tunnel throughout, but never more than a few centimetres deep and I can be quite confident that it rarely rises above that height. Why? because last week I saw a Daubenton's bat tucked into an angle in the rock less than 30cm from the floor. I have rarely seen bats low on the walls of other hibernacula, but here they have been seen doing this several times.

In January this year I walked through the tunnel, noting the various Myotid bats. almost 250m from the entrance was an especially small bat. I had to look at it for a few moments before the evidence of my own eyes registered: it was a Pipistrelle. Why on earth a Pipistrelle had chosen to hibernate so deep in an upland underground site is beyond me! Normally Pipistrelles hibernate in conditions with far less consistent temperature and humidity. I would love to have known which Pipistrelle species it was, but without handling it, it was impossible to tell.

Undoubtedly my favourite oddity at this site was a Natterer's, which had found itself a small crevice. Perhaps the bat would prefer it if the site had more crevices for them to crawl into, as at other hibernacula, because this bat seems to have decided it wanted to be in the crevice come hell or high water. It had managed to get it's head in and no more and there it had settled down to hibernate. It had it's backside stuck in the air and it's wings akimbo, looking for all the world as though someone had hammered it in with a mallet...

Regular reader of this blog will have heard this many times by now, but please be aware that it is usually a criminal offence to enter a bat hibernaculum in the UK without a licence issued by one of the statutory nature conservation organisations (NE, SNH, CCW etc). It is also extremely dangerous to venture underground without training. Blundering about below ground in winter is a great way to harm both yourself and hibernating bats. Sorry, but my sympathies are with the latter! If you want to take part in these activities, join your local bat group. What are you waiting for?

My website: plecotus.co.uk
Contact me: mailto:blog@plecotus.co.uk

Winter Bat Activity

2009-01-27T18:41:00.005Z

We tend to think of winter as a time when bats hibernate and won't be seen again until spring. In fact hibernation is not as simple as that: bats do awaken at times and move around. Indeed, they are sometimes seen flying in the midst of winter.

This afternoon whilst walking the dogs I spotted a Pipistrelle foraging over the River Esk. It was flying round in circles in the clockwork flight pattern typical of the genus and occasionally dropping down to catch an insect. A feature of winter bat activity is that it happens in daytime, as the higher ambient temperature means there is a greater likelihood of catching enough insect prey to offset the energy costs involved in coming out of hibernation.

I tried unsuccessfully to interest the dogs in the bat, as I have an idea it could be rather useful to have a dog trained to listen for bat calls and alert me when there's a bat nearby. Unfortunately, my pair of canine delinquents find the command "sit" quite challenging, so they aren't likely to succeed in training as bat-dogs.

When I passed by later on at dusk the bat was still hard at work hunting and seemed to be having some success, despite the ambient temperature being only 3 or 4 degrees. I have heard several suggestions as to why bats occasionally feed during the winter. It may be that individuals have been forced out of hibernation because they have failed to build sufficient fat reserves to see them through the winter, but it seems more likely that fluctuations in temperature may cause individuals to take advantage of the opportunity to forage on insects which have become active.

Different bat species have differing requirements for hibernation. Here in Scotland Myotis species, such as Daubenton's (Myotis daubentonii) or Natterer's Bats (M. nattereri) seem to be particularly exacting, hibernating below ground in caves and mines which feature a steady, low temperature, low airflow and high humidity. They usually hibernate in crevices or ledges where the microclimate may be particularly stable.

Brown Long-eared Bats (Plecotus auritus) are less exacting. When found underground they tend to hibernate on walls or hanging from the roof and are often closer to mine entrances than the Myotids.

The least exacting bats are the Pipistrelles, which are rarely found underground, instead selecting relatively exposed holes and crevices, which are more likely to be influenced by changes in the weather. Whether there are differences between the two Pipistrelles is difficult to judge. As they are impossible to differentiate without handling, they tend to be lumped together in hibernation surveys.

Last winter I wrote about a castle where a group of Pipistrelles and a Brown Long-eared were hibernating in crevices within a cellar (See "Hibernating Pipistrelles", February 2008). The castle sits atop a hill and there is a constant breeze blowing through the cellar. Unsurprisingly, no Myotids were found hibernating there.

A hibernating Pipistrelle

Carol and Nigel Terry, our local bat carers noted that a casualty Pipistrelle kept through the winter in a cold room tended to wake up and feed every 10-14 days. It may be that Pipistrelle autecology makes use of winter foraging opportunities and that they choose hibernation sites which better allow them to respond to these opportunities.

My website: David Dodds Ecology

Blog feedback: Your comments

Bat-workers & golf carts: be very afraid!

2009-01-25T21:53:00.008Z

At this time of year there seems little for a bat-worker to do. Hibernaculum surveys are strictly limited, to avoid the risk of disturbance and there are only so many site visits one can do before running out of enthusiasm for assessing bat potential! These are the days when the mind wanders back to highlights of "real" bat work, before the onset of winter.

One such highlight last year was an autumn visit to a well-known golf and country club in the Borders to check and clean the bat boxes. A large group of bat-workers from Lothians and Borders Bat Groups assembled to go round the boxes, checking them for bats and recording the amount of droppings (an indication of how well each box has been used during the year).

I'm not entirely sure whether it shows trust or naivete, but we were allowed the use of a small fleet of golf carts in order to get round the course with our ladders. If you have never seen a conga line of golf carts, full of bat workers and equipment snaking across the landscape you have never known fear!

Fortunately we were accompanied by the course green keeper and one of his team, which probably helped curb the temptation to descend to the level of "Wacky Races". More importantly, it allowed them to see for themselves the great work they have done, making and erecting bat boxes around the course.

Annual bat box checks have several practical purposes. Firstly, the boxes can be cleaned out in readiness for the next year and any damage identified for fixing. Secondly, we have the opportunity to assess the extent to which each box has been used, providing data which shows the progress of the individual bat box scheme and, when combined with other schemes, a rough measure of how bat populations are doing locally. Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, less experienced bat group members get an opportunity to get close to live bats. Many very active bat workers (including me) started off with bats, with the thrill of seeing a Pipistrelle in a bat box.

In South East Scotland it is extremely rare to find anything other than Pipistrelles in bat boxes (with some intriguing exceptions in recent months) and this site was true to that experience. In autumn boxes tend to be used by male Pipistrelles as the base for a mating territory and it is usual to find boxes occupied by either an individual male or by a male and a harem of females. Where boxes are grouped together it is unusual to find more than one occupied, as they would lie within the same territory. The droppings however, often reveal that other boxes have been used, either earlier in the year or in differing conditions, with bats moving between boxes to find optimum temperate conditions.

The course is home to some remarkable buildings and is known to be home to roosts of Brown long-eared Bats (Plecotus auritus), Common Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) and Soprano Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus). Best of all is a large maternity colony of Daubenton's Bats Myotis daubentonii). Although the roost was breaking up at the time of our visit, we were still able to glimpse a group of around 20 bats clustered together. I took the photograph below earlier in the year, when there were over 50 bats present, with a cluster of Nycteribia kolenatii bat-fly pupae clustered around (you can see them better in the lower picture).

It was a very successful day in terms of finding bats, recording useful data and giving people the chance to get close to bats. Best of all it was that very rare thing: a chance for bat-workers to get together in daylight!

Please note: handling or disturbing bats is a criminal offence without an appropriate licence issued by a statutory nature conservation organisation (Scottish Natural Heritage, Natural England, Countryside Council for Wales, Northern Ireland Environment Agency).

Most bat groups welcome new members and give them the opportunity to take part in events like this. To find your local bat group contact the Bat Conservation Trust

My website: David Dodds Ecology

An 1892 Bat-worker

2009-01-08T21:20:00.006Z

As an ecologist whose first degree was in history, I have always had an interest in the development of natural history. I would love to have been one of those wealthy edwardian or victorian country parsons whose lives were devoted to natural history (whilst presumably paying a curate to take care of the religious stuff!)

Last year I heard a talk about the use the Botanical Society of the British Isles makes of historical records in order to understand changes in the distribution of vascular plants. Some of their impressive database comes from the notebooks of victorian botanists and the voucher specimens they made, which are often still to be seen in herbaria. Other records are found by trawling old natural history books and drawing out biological records from descriptions of species and their distribution. Inspired by this I resolved to seek out any such data I could regarding bats in my part of Scotland.

It took a while to find a suitable source of data: bats were not recorded anything like as much as vascular plants were, botany being a "suitable" occupation for those few victorians and edwardians who had time to spare. However, I recently came across a copy of "The Mammalian Fauna of the Edinburgh District", written by William Evans in 1892. In it, Evans set out to record the distribution of mammals in Eastern Scotland between the Tay and the Tweed (a rather broad definition of "Edinburgh distict" by today's standards). He particularly wanted to record the distribution of bats and small mammals, as these were felt to be under-recorded at the time. Arguably then, Mr Evans was one of the first ever bat-workers in Scotland.

There are some fascinating distinctions between the work of this dedicated natural historian and modern bat-work, but some remarkable parallels too.

Not surprisingly, the methods used are utterly different and at times seem a little barbaric to a modern reader. In a day when bat detectors were still 6 or 7 decades away, the art of finding bats was focussed on roosts and upon seeing and catching bats in flight. Whereas today we consider it appropriate to make biological records based on seeing (or hearing) a bat and recording the salient characteristics, in an age when conservation was unheard of and probably unnecessary, the true scientist's voucher specimen was a dead animal. Evans described removing bats from roosts, catching them in flight using butterfly and fishing nets, plus some less savoury approaches. The Daubenton's Bat (then Vespertilio daubentoni, now Myotis daubentonii) seems to have come in for more of it's fair share of hasrh treatment: "During the summer of 1869 I observed a number of bats flitting above a still reach of the Esk above Penicuik, and one which I succeeded in striking down with a walking stick proved to be of this species."

Three other specimens of this species were sent to him from the Dunbar area by a contact who, rather than battering them to death with a walking stick, chose the gentlemanly approach....and shot them!

In another section Evans describes how impressed he was with the nimble flight of a Pipistrelle he watched, though his methods of evaluating this were a little rough by today's standards: "In June last I watched one for fully a quarter of an hour flying in the bright sunshine at Broomhall, near Dunfermline and was much struck with its activity and the facility with which it evaded stones and other missiles thrown at it."

Lest you think too poorly of Evans, he also described caring for live bats (probably captures, rather than the sick and injured bats the modern bat-worker might deal with), in particular a Brown Long-eared Bat given to him by the gamekeeper at Dalkeith Country Park (where there is still a Brown Long-eared roost): "It delights in scrambling about the pictures, the window-blinds and even the chairs; and often settles on the floor, where it moves with considerable rapidity (indeed, it may almost be said to run), keeping the body practically clear of the ground. A more knowing little creature I have seldom seen; and, having discovered that there is sufficient space below the room-door for it to creep through, it's endeavours to overcome obstacles placed in the way of it's escape are most persistent and amusing."

Aside from the very limited equipment Evans had available by modern standards, the victorian understanding of bat taxonomy was rather different. He describes there being 12 species of bat nationwide, whereas today we accept there are 16 or 17 (depending on your views about the Greater Mouse-eared bat's status in the British Isles). The most obvious difference is the Pipistrelle. We now know that there are three Pipistrelle species in the UK, whereas in Evan's day only one was known, the splitting of Common and Soprano Pipistrelles being still a century away.

The most surprising thing about Evan's work and the thing for which he deserves to be remembered is the fact that, despite limited taxonomic understanding and huge limitations in method and equipment, compared with today, his description of the bat fauna of the area is remarkably in tune with what we know today. He described Brown Long-eareds as "by no means rare", Daubenton's Bats as "...locally at least, not uncommon" and Pipistrelles as "undoubtedly by far the most abundant and generally distributed." Ignoring the split of the Pipistrelle species, these three are the most abundant bat species in the region today.

More impressive still is that he was remarkably accurate about the rarer species too. He described a record of Natterer's Bats from near Dalkeith (the two known roosts of that species in the Lothians today are in the Dalkeith area) and goes on to hypothesise that Whiskered Bats are likely to be present in the region too. They are, but there are only three modern records of them in the Lothians. In fact, his only shortfall was his failure to mention the Noctule, which we now know to be present in the Lothians. Whether they were present 117 years ago is a moot point, but it's only in the past decade that they have been identified in south east Scotland. Were they here in Evan's time? We'll never know.

If you're interested in helping to put historical biological records to work, try visiting http://herbariaunited.org/atHome/ This project uses on-line volunteers to transfer information from thousands of old herbarium sheets onto a modern database. It's easy to do and rather addictive!

My website: http://www.blogger.com/www.plecotus.co.uk

Biological Recording & The Scottish Parliament

2008-12-10T12:23:00.002Z

My recent work on Noctule distribution in south east Scotland (when I get a moment I'll write an update on it) clearly showed how disjointed biological recording is at present. Common understanding of the distribution of this species north of the border turned out to be at odds with reality, once an effort was made to gather records from all possible sources and to address shortfalls. It's relatively easy to do this with a charismatic mammal species, but what about the thousands of other species, for whom we have disjointed and poorly collated distribution information?

BRISC (Biological Recording in Scotland) have placed a petition on the Scottish Parliament website, calling for action to be taken to address this, so that planning and conservation decisions can be made on the basis of full and appropriate information.

Please take a moment to sign the petition. it doesn't matter if you're not resident in Scotland - your opinion still counts.

http://epetitions.scottish.parliament.uk/view_petition.asp?PetitionID=291

Thanks

El Duende, Tomb Bats and Handling the Hairy-legged Vampire

2008-11-25T22:49:00.008Z

With a title like that, perhaps I should have published this at Halloween! But this is the time of year when relatives (or Mr Claus, depending on your age-group) are liable to ask that awful question "What would you like for Christmas?" Having dispensed with the obvious, but hopeless answers of a Jaguar XK120, a Hebridean island and an unlimited research budget (why is it only kids get their heartfelt desires at Christmas?) we then have the nightmare problem of coming up with something we actually want for Christmas that costs under twenty quid. And if we don't come up with something pretty damn fast the result will inevitably be socks, a jumper or one of those naff coffee table wildlife books with lots of pretty pictures and no real content.

Given that last thought, it occurred to me to share my thoughts on three bat books I have come across recently. They are out of the mainstream but they're a good read and are actually in print, unlike some books which should be but aren't (yes, I mean you, Collins New Naturalist - get your fingers out and reprint John Altringham's book.)

The first is the inspiring and impressive "A Bat Man in the Tropics: Chasing El Duende" by Theodore H. Fleming. Fleming has spent his entire adult life studying bats in Central America and Australia. I find it hard to get into books which simply describe impressive wild animals I am unlikely to ever see. Fleming doesn't do that: this is a very readable book which describes his life's work in a very human way. You really feel you're with him, up to your ears in mud and insects, studying pollinating bats. If you want something to immerse yourself in, rather than watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on Boxing Day, this is it.

Incidentally, "El Duende" is Spanish for ghost or hobgoblin, which seems quite appropriate, but Fleming uses it as a metaphor for the seach for knowledge about bats, which is deeper but also appropriate.
Next comes a small book called simply "Bats in Roofs". I have to admit I bought this without realising it's provenance. It was published by the Bat Interest Group of Kwazulu-Natal (for those who had the misfortune to be educated instead of going to school, that's in South Africa). This book describes the bat species found in the group's part of Africa, but what fascinates me is the detailed information about bat management techniques used there. They have similar bat-work problems to us in the UK (hence the name of the book), but with interesting twists. For example, the structure of their buildings are very different and their bat species occupy a broader range of niches than ours.

A common problem there is the occupation of verandahs by Epauletted Fruit Bats and Mauritian Tomb Bats (they have great common names for their bats), with the accompanying mess caused by loose droppings. And the solution? A helium balloon tethered on the verandah is apparently an effective deterrent! For anyone involved in practical bat work in the UK, this book offers a new angle on the subject. What is more it's only 44 pages long, so it lies within the pocket of your younger relatives. If they're anything like mine, they'll have found it on-line, ordered it and returned to their Playstations before you've even powered up your laptop.

My final suggestion is "Expedition Field Techniques: Bats". Written by Kate Barlow (now of BCT), this is a practical guide to carrying out field work with bats abroad. It's very comprehensive: for example, I opened it at random and found a picture entitled "Handling a hairy-legged Vampire Bat caught in Columbia". So if you'd like to know how to handle a Hairy-legged Vampire Bat in Columbia, this is the book for you. It is a concisely written manual which is aimed at the professional zoologist and, like the other two books, it throws an intriguing light on the practical study of bat ecology around the world. I find that dipping into it occasionally puts a new angle on British bat work and sometimes puts the difficulties of studying bats in the UK into context.

So, those are my suggestions. If you get a stripey jumper or a pair of furry slippers for Christmas, don't say you weren't warned.

"A Bat Man in the Tropics: Chasing El Duende" by Theodore H. Fleming is published by the University of California Press (2003)
"Bats in Roofs" by The Bat Interest Group of Kwazulu-Natal is published by Flame Tree Media (2007)
"Expedition Field Techniques: Bats" by Kate Barlow is published by the Expedition Advisory Centre of the Royal Georgraphical Society (1999)

My website: http://www.plecotus.co.uk/

A Conundrum of Parasites

2008-11-09T16:51:00.011Z

I was asked to do a talk at the BCT Scottish Bat Conference this year about bat parasites. What follows is a simplified version of my presentation...

When Anne Youngman first asked me to do this presentation I put the phone down and found myself looking at the slides, jars and vials, containing hundreds of specimens of bat parasites, which as you can see take pride of place on my desk. I found myself wondering what the collective noun for a group of parasites might be. You get a herd of cattle, a parliament of owls, a murder of crows and even a boogle of weasels: what about parasites?

My first thought, given the reaction of most people to parasites was a yeeuch of parasites. Then I reflected that that doesn't match my own view: I find these strange creatures quite fascinating. Then I considered an omnibus of parasites, given the number of times I have searched in vain for specimens of a particular species, only to have several come along at once. I finally settled on a conundrum of parasites: there are many gaps in our knowledge and unasnwered questions about the parasites hosted by bats, so conundrum seems an appropriate noun.

What I would like to do today is introduce you to just a few of these conundrums or unaswered questions and hopefully show you how we, as active bat-workers, can make a contribution to answering these condundrums.

First though, for the benefit of those who haven't recently looked at page 54 of "The Bat Worker's Manual", which gives an excellent summary, here's a brief overview of British bat parasites, to put what follows into context.

The basic definition of a parasite is an animal (or plant), which lives on another animal and gains nourishment from the host, without benefitting it or killing it. It is also useful to understand the difference between ectoparasites, which live outside the host's body (e.g. fleas and ticks) and endoparasites, which live within the host's body (e.g. tapeworms or helminths). In this talk I will be concentrating on ectoparasites, and specifically those which are large enough to be found by us when handling live bats.

We should also consider host specificity: some parasites are generalists and may parasitise almost any warm-blooded animal. For example the ticks or hravest mites that pester me are as likely to pester my dog or a passing fox or deer. On the other hand, some parasites are highly host specific and will only parasitise a single species or perhaps a genus or small group of hosts which share a roost. Many bat parasites are highly host specific.

Let's briefly consider parasites taxonomy. British bat ectoparasites fall easily into five convenient groups. The arachnids are closely related to spiders and this is reflected in the fact that adults have 8 legs. These comprise the ticks and mites. Insect parasites of bats comprise fleas, bat bugs and bat flies.

Clockwise from top left - Nycteribia kolenatii (bat fly); Ischnopsyllus octactenus (bat flea); Argas vespertilionis (bat tick); Spinturnix myoti (bat mite). Centre: Cimex lectularius (human bed bug).

These pictures show a Blyborough Tick or Argas vespertilionis, one of just two species of tick wheich exclusively parasitise bats in Britain.

The mites are represented by Spinturnix myoti, one of over 50 mite species recorded on bats in the UK. As well as the largest group they are also the most diverse, occupying many different niches around the body. This species lives exclusively on the wing and tail membranes. This is a female, indicated by the rounded abdomen. This species is viviperous and she is gravid: carrying a larva, to which she will soon give birth as a protonymph. Or that would have happened had she not been pickled in alcohol!

As you can see, bat fleas look superficially like the fleas you may find on your cat or dog: dorsally flattened and with huge legs. Eight flea species have been recorded on bat in Britain.

There are two species of bat fly believed to be present in the UK, usually found on Daubentons and Bechsteins Bats. A third species is believed to be extinct. These animals are highly adapted to life on a bat. Although they are flies, their wings are reduced to simple buds.

Finally, I have shown here a picture of a human bed bug to illustrate the very close similiarities between bed bugs and bat bugs.

A fascinating aspect of this subject for me is the lessons that bat parasites can teach us about their hosts. For example, when sampling mites on Natterer's and Daubenton's Bats in autumn I have often noticed a significantly higher parasite load on females and juveniles than on adult males. This presumably reflects the fact that the females and juveniles have been confined together within the maternity roost for a number of weeks, giving the mites the opportunity to reproduce and spread from host to host. The males on the other hand, will have been in smaller groups and able to move between roost sites much more frequently, reducing the opportunity for the parasites to spread.

With the development of Mitochondrial DNA analysis, there will be many more opportunities to use parasites to learn about bats. A good example is a piece of work recently completed in Switzerland, which studied MtDNA in Greater Mouse-eared Bats, a species of mite which parasitises them and another bat species which also hosts the same parasite. Using their data, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the Greater Mouse-eared, whose distribution is restricted to mainland Europe, was previously present in Corsica.

My first conundrum relates to the Spinturnix family of mites: the Spinturncidae. These are the largest mites found on bats and often the most obvious to the naked eye. They are between 0,5 and 1.5mm long and are only found on the win and tail membranes of the bat, making them easy to see. This slide shows a Daubenton's Bat and you can just make out something within the red circle.

When we zoom in we can clearly see a mite on the wing membrane. This is Spinturnix myoti, a species which parasitises Daubenton's, Natterers and Whiskered Bats.

This brief segment of video shows it's close relative Spinturnix acuminatus. I recently removed this specimen from the wing of a Noctule and here we can see it walking across a microscope slide. You can make out the slightly pointed abdomen, in contrast to the rounded abdomen of the gravid female we saw earlier, indicating that this is a male.

In 2003 Anne Baker of the Natural History Museum and Jenny Craven of Leeds University published a paper which brought together a piece of work funded by the british Ecological Society. They set out to gather all the known records of bat mites in Britain and to examine all available specimens. Their paper set out a checklist of species. This slide summarises their results for the Spinturnix family: eight species, each with the main hosts. However, there are two problems.

Spinturnix Species A has yet to be formally named as a species and may turn out to be a variant of Spinturnix acuminatus. A few female specimens were found on Barbastelles and, until more specimens are founf, the status of these mites will remain uncertain.

Closer to home is the question of Spinturnix mystacinus and Spinturnix myoti. S. myoti is found on Daubenton's, Natterer's and Whiskered Bats. S. mystacinus is found only on Whiskered Bats, the difference between the two being very small. It may be the case that it is in fact a synonym of S. myoti. As you migh expect, a problem with resolving this taxonomic issue is the fact that Whiskered Bats are far from common. More specimens of Spinturnix mites from Whiskered Bats could help in clarifying the status of this species.

Conundrum two concerns the geographic distribution of ectoparasite species. To illustrate this I have chosen to use the Blyborough Tick Argas vespertilionis. This slide shows dorsal and ventral views of an adult. The ruler alongside shows millimetre divisions. I have selected this species because it is easily identified: it is almost entirely round and usually looks like a little 5p coin, either lumbering about the roost as an adult or as a larva, attached to a host, lying vertically within the fur.

The other reason for choosing this species is that it is supported by a professional recording scheme: the Tick Recording Scheme, run by the Health Protection Agency. If any bat parasite species is likely to be well recorded, it is this one.

The main chart here shows the existing distribution records in Scotland: just four records, some of them quite old. Does this indicate that this species is scarce? Or that it is declining, or limited in range to the west?

Probably not: if you look at the inset map, I have added records based on specimens I have found or which have been sent to me over the past two years. As you can see, this has trebled the number of records in Scotland for this species. Bearing in mind that this is probably the best recorded bat parasite species (possibly excluding the fleas, which have a very dedicated national recorder), you can see the problem with distribution data!

Conundrum 3 relates to the so-called Chigger Mites or Trombiculidae. This picture shows the larav of a member of this family. You can make out the mouth-parts to the left, sourrounded by the legs: only six of them as this is a larva. The remainder of it looks pretty much like a little orange jelly-baby.

This slide shows them attached to a host: in this case a Soprano Pipistrelle, with four larvae attached to her ear. They remain attached whilst taking a blood-feed, which provides what they need to metamorphose. After a few days they leave the host and as nymphs and adults they predate on smaller arthropods within the bat roost.

I have seen these larve on Soprano and Common Pipistrelles, Natterer's Bats and Daubenton's Bats. (at this point I asked for a show of hands and over half the audience had also seen Trombiculidae larvae on bats). From that we can see that this is far from an unusual feature.

When Baker and Craven completed their study of British bat mite records in 2003 they had found only four records of Tromiculidae, one of which is questionable. Why should this be? As with the Blyborough Tick, may be partly about a lack of recording effort, but there is another problem with Trombiculidae: identification. There is in fact a published key to thes family. So surely it's just a matter of working through the key until you arrive at the species? The problem is that the key runs to five volumes and the volume which refers to the species found on British bats is 1,100 pages long! So identification of these mites is a real labour of love.

The final conundrum concerns bat bugs. This amazing picture was sent to me recently by Paul Hope and shows a Noctule with two bat bugs attached to it's forearm. My question is: are they Cimex pipistrelli or Cimex dissimilis? There is a long-standing uncertainty about whether both these species are present in the UK or not, fuelled by the fact that the differences are tiny and the taxonomy is the subject of some uncertainty. A DNA study in the Czech Republic aims to resolve these issues and specimens of bat bugs, especially from Pipistrelles, are sought to assist in this.

One of the joys of working with parasites is the occasional opportunity to gross people out. I notice I wasn't scheduled last before lunch, probably for very good reasons...

This slide shows the business end of Cimex pipistrelli. It's a ventral view of the head and I've labelled the forelegs and antenna, to help you get your bearnings. You can just make out the stylet, the organ the bug uses to feed, lying flat against the underside of the head, within it's protective sheath.

This slide shows how the bug uses it's stylet to go about feeding. You'll notice I have coloured the host a fetching pink, to reflect the fact that human bed bugs feed in exactly the same way!

First, the bug pushes it's stylet through the skin of the host...

This is where it gets interesting. The stylet is both flexible and prehensile and it commences probing around the flesh...

...until it finds a capillary and commences feeding. The probing and cutting through the flesh creates a contusion and slight swelling which is occasionally visible on the wing of bat. You may also find it on your own body if your choice of last-minute bargain holiday doesn't wuite work out as you had hoped!

I hope you have found this talk interesting and that one or two of you may still feel like eating your lunch. Hopefully I have also shown what an opportunity there is for us, as active bat workers to make a very real difference to the sum of human knowledge in this area. The four conundrums I have described barely scratch the surface: the simple fact is that any and all parasite specimens are useful and welcome.

(A handout in the delegates pack included details of how to take specimens and where to send them, together with a bibliography - there is more information on this on my website)

My website: http://plecotus.co.uk/

Ana...nother thing or two about the SD1

2008-11-09T13:34:00.008Z

Earlier in the year I described my impressions and opinions about the Anabat SD1, describing it as "God's own bat detector" (August 2008). Since then I have had many more opportunities to use the machines in a wide variety of situations and discussed them with a number of people, including those who were kind enough to reply to my post with advice and information (thanks!).

One thing I commented on then was the option to pay nearly £450 extra for a PDA (hand-held computer) mounted on a bracket on the front of an Anabat. This delivers the opportunity to view live sonograms as bats fly past. Although a great teaching tool and potentially quite useful in the field I had strong doubts about whether this was a realistic option as it is a lot of cash to lay out on something which would be vulnerable to damage in the field, unlike the Anabat on it's own, which is quite robust.

After receiving some intriguing emails I decided to look for an alternative way of achieving the same end. I spend quite a bit of time training bat-workers and a way of displaying live sonograms without touting a lap-top around could be very handy.

The finished SD1 + PDA + GPS in use

Chris Corben, who designed the Anabat, has an excellent website, full of practical suggestions, based on his own experience of using Anabats (see below). This includes a step-by-step idiot's guide to setting up a PDA to work with an Anabat and even some advice on PDA models known to work. A look on eBay revealed that some of these are out-dated for more advance puposes and are therefore available cheaply second-hand. A few days later I had an HP Ipaq HX2190 in my hands for the princely sum of £38.25. It came with the cables and cradle to charge it and link it my home PC. Following Chris's notes it was remarkably easy to install Anapocket (the PDA version of the Anabat software - it comes free with the Anabat) onto the PDA and I was quickly able to view sonograms I had recorded previously.

Next I needed to connect the PDA to one of my Anabats. The cable used for this is the same as those used for synchronising a PDA with a PC - I just needed to find one with a serial plug rather than the more usual (nowadays) USB plug. Once again eBay came up trumps (£3.85). Hey presto! Live sonograms - it really was that easy.

The next thing I needed was a bracket to attach the PDA to the Anabat, so I could walk around with it. There are three threaded holes on the SD1 case, designed to take bolts on the standard bracket. These are simply M3 machine screw holes (the bolts are readily available from DIY shops). I considered making a bracket out of some aluminium or brass sheet, with two folds to make the required U shape. I remain concerned about the vulnerability of the whole set-up and decided instead to make a bracket out of 7 mm foam board - a lightweight yet strong material used in building exhibition displays etc and available from large stationers.

A little experimentation showed the best size and shape for three pieces to create the bracket (email me if you'd like a copy of this). A little Araldite and spray paint (the latter more cosmetic than anything else) and I had a strong, yet light bracket. I attached the PDA to the bracket using stick-on velcro strips. In the event of the unit being dropped or bashed against something the foam board is likely to break before the PDA, so my small investment will be safe. More importantly, so will any survey data on the PDA.

To make the most of this new set-up in the field I needed two more things: a spare battery for the PDA and a CF GPS unit to plug into the top of it. It is possible to use a Bluetooth GPS with the PDA (if, like my one it is Bluetooth enabled, though I think most are), but Chris mentions experiencing problems with the GPS and PDA losing contact from time to time. I also think that, when using an automated GPS in the field, there is a danger of the GPS losing the satellites and the user being unaware of it. Having the GPS plugged into the top of the PDA means it will always be held upwards, unshielded and in the best possible position to retain a view of the GPS satellites.

In my earlier piece about Anabats I bemoaned the fact that, when using an Anabat with a GPS, it was necessary to manually cross-reference bat passes against a GPS file to get a grid reference for each bat. Using a PDA with GPS resolves this problem and now all my bat passes are automatically grid referenced by the PDA. I also questionedthe problem of losing night vision by looking at a PDA screen in the dark. Even turning down the PDA brightness to minimum may leave it too bright. I had heard a Titley employee describing keeping the PDA facing away when not looking at it, which seemed rather self-defeating. I have resolved this by changing the colours on the screen, so that the background is black and the sonogram traces and Anapocket menus are the only things in a bright colour.

The PDA screen, with the Anapocket background set to black, to reduce glare.

So now I have a great teaching tool, a really good toy and a solution to the problem of GPS-referencing bat passes. Compared to the £450 it could have cost I actually paid a total of £61.63 (plus a bit for postage and packaging). I still think it's a Heath Robinson approach and vulnerable to damage, but I don't mind that so much when I've saved £387. After several decades of living in Scotland, something seems to have rubbed off....

Chris Corben's Anabat website: http://www.hoarybat.com/

Anabats in the UK are sold by Alana Ecology, who are usually knowledgeable and helpful: http://alanaecology.com

My website: http://plecotus.co.uk

A Result of Careless Angling

2008-10-01T19:55:00.010+01:00

We often hear about the terrible effects that abandoned fishing line and hooks can have on swans, but it isn't so often we hear how it also affects bats. Hear in Scotland the main form of recreational angling is fly-fishing and a fly designed to be attractive to a trout can have just the same attraction for a bat.

One recent Sunday morning I was hoisted from my slothful lie-in by a call from the Pentland Hills Ranger Service. A member of the public had spotted a bat suspended from a telegraph wire alongside a loch used as a fishery and Victor (one of the Rangers) was hoping I could help. The Pentland Hills are close to my home and half an hour later I was standing beside him, looking at the bat, suspended above our heads. It was showing no signs of life.

The first problem was working out what the set of wires carried, as I had no desire to get mixed up with high voltages. Fortunately the bat was dangling from telephone wires. The next problem was how to reach it, 6 metres above the ground. I had brought a telescoping ladder and we tried lashing this to the side of the Ranger Service Landrover. Not only was climbing it not an experience I would repeat in a hurry (awfully wobbly!), it didn't get me high enough to reach the bat.

Enter the owner of the fishery, stage left, with a knife lashed to the end of a long pole (which shows how often this particular problem occurs) With a bit of work the bat was cut free and fortunately had a soft landing. It was a juvenile male Soprano Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus), tangled up in a length of fishing line with two hooked flies. It seemed barely alive, though that may have been partly due to the amount of line tangled round it.

It transpired that the bat had a fly caught in it's mouth, presumably because it had seen what looked like a tasty meal swaying in the wind and attempted to catch it. In the warmth of the vistor centre it started to move about more. I couldn't see the tip of the hook and, as it was quite deep in his mouth, I couldn't be sure if it was caught in his throat. Luckily he was able to drink and later, at home took some minced up cat food (sorry Haggis, but the bat's need was greater than yours!), suggesting he wasn't too badly hooked.

The next morning I contacted the Dick Vet Small Animal Hospital, part of Edinburgh University. Kevin Eatwell, one of the specialist wildlife vets there anesthetised the bat and removed the hook. He seemed none the worse for wear and that evening I took him back to a spot close to where he was found and released him.

On the 300m length of telegraph wire which runs parallel to the loch I could see seven other lengths of fishing line caught around the wire, at least one of which carried a hook. Not only is this the result of bad casting, leaving it without bothering to tell anyone is nothing short of criminal, especially as the fishery owner is equipped to remove it. After all, there has been considerable publicity about the dangers posed to wildife by abandoned fishing tackle causes.

My web-site: plecotus.co.uk

The Dick Vet Small Animal Hospital: http://www.vet.ed.ac.uk/cliniclaserv/HfSA/Exoticwildlife.htm

The Pentland Hills Ranger Service: http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/phrp/rangerservice/rangerservice.html

Last Bat of Morning

2008-08-31T20:37:00.003+01:00

I came across this wonderful piece of writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg, originally published in the New York Times. It really captures the essence of dawn and dusk outside a bat roost.

It's 6 a.m., a dark, gray morning in late August, the dim light a reminder how far we've gone on the downhill side of summer. Ethel, a border terrier, and I are behind the house investigating a woodchuck scent. There is a dark smudge in the mist above us, and then another. The bats are returning to their bat house, a thin, slatted box, high up under the eaves. Each bat comes in over the roof, makes a dive for the ground and then swoops upward toward the narrow entrance of the bat house. Some slip inside on the first try, some fall back and try again. After a few minutes, the air is still, the last bat home. Ethel and I turn toward breakfast.

I have seen the bats come out at evening again and again. It is one of the joys of living here, watching them drop one by one into the night. But I've only seen them coming home a few times. The bats of evening are the last flutter in a world that is growing still. The bats of early morning have already been engulfed by birdsong, rooster-crow, the stirring of nearly every creature on this place. Their flight is less erratic just before roosting, no longer distracted by an insect in the air. It's as though each bat brings a scrap of night's darkness home with it, leaving the sky pale and brightening. It's as though night itself were being stored in the bat house till dusk.

When the last bat had vanished, I felt almost absurdly alone, strangely vacant in that thin slice of morning. It reminded me of a feeling from the city a long time ago - that moment, after staying up all night, when you can feel the world gathering pace and energy just as you're beginning to fade. Watching those dawn bats, I imagined them punching out of their night's work as they settled, and I felt as if I'd somehow clocked into their schedule. And it seemed that the best use of a dark, gray morning with mist in the air was to go back to bed, only a few feet, and a couple of walls, away from where the bats are sleeping.

(Normally I have a thing about horrible US English spelling, but writing this good deserves to be left as the author intended!)

My website: http://www.plecotus.co.uk/

Your comments: mailto:blog@plecotus.co.uk

God's Own Bat Detector

2008-08-20T19:38:00.007+01:00

Ok, that's maybe overdoing it a bit, but I have recently become a fan of the Anabat SD1. For some time now the SD1, and it's more cumbersome predecessor the Anabat II (with ZCAIM recorder) has been the industry standard equipment world-wide for passive monitoring, and rightly too, but having spoken to several people who rated it highly as a detector for use on transect surveys I though I'd better try it out.

There are several reasons the Anabat is so good for passive recording. Alternative methods of recording bat calls use audio formats such as .WAV or .MP3, which quickly gobble up available memory in just a few hours. The Anabat records each bat pass as a series of co-ordinates, plotting the loudest frequency every few milliseconds, creating miniscule data files, allowing many thousands of bat passes to be squeezed onto a single 1Gb CF memory card.

The fact that the memory card is held within the detector is a further advantage, but the biggest advantage lies in the way the detector ignores the spaces between bat passes and simply records each bat pass (or other ultrasonic noise) as a new file. The Analook software which comes with the machine allows you to very quickly scroll from bat call to bat call, identifying each pass and creating a spreasheet showing each one, with date, time and species. The time saving, compared with using other software analysis systems, such as Batsound or Batscan is huge.

So the Anabat is great as a passive detector - why is it good for transect work? The designer, Chris Corben, has built in an interface which allows a GPS receiver to be plugged into the detector. Every two seconds the Anabat asks the GPS where it is and records that data on the CF card, alongside all the bat passes it records as you walk along. This means that for each bat you encounter you have a sonogram of it's call, the date, the time and an accurate grid reference.

Anabat SD1 with Etrex GPS velcroed to it and connected.

What more could you ask for?

Well, I've made it sound great, and it is, but there are plenty of problems too (though apparently Titley Electronics, who make the machine have recognised that there is a huge market for the machine and are working hard at improving it):

1. The GPS data isn't attached to the sonogram: you have to transfer it manually.
2. Even with the GPS and Anabat both set to the correct time, an error of one hour creeps in, though it's easily edited out.
3. Becasue the machine is built in Australia, the GPS data is recorded as Latitude and Longitude, using the WGS84 datum, instead of the British OS datum. This means you have to use a utility programme to convert the data to British National Grid and remember to convert the datum, otherwise you can end up with proper-looking grid references, which are simply wrong.
4. The standard Anabat microphone is not as sensitive as it could be. I set the Anabat's sensitivity control as high as it could take and used it alongside a Bat Box Duet. The Duet was clearly more sensitive, which was disappointing, given the Anabat's £1,400 price tag.

Despite all the above, Anabat plus GPS is still streets ahead of anything else currently available. When used together with the GPSU GPS utility programme and the superlative DMAPW mapping programme, bat data can be identified and transferred to a map with incredible ease and efficiency. Unlike Victor wotsit, the chap who was so impressed with a shaver he bought the company, I didn't go that far, but three weeks after buying an Anabat for passive monitoring I'd bought another for transect surveys, despite the high price.

It's worth mentioning that you can buy an SD1 with a PDA mounted on the front and a GPS plugged into the hand-held computer. This allows you to see sonograms live and also tags the GPS data onto each bat pass as it records it, which is a fabulous toy, but of questionable value.

I was on the receiving end of a hard sell for this system at the Welsh Bat Conference and failed to understand why I would want to pay an extra £400+ for this. Titley admit that the PDA screen will cause you to lose your night vision and advise that you should carry it, pointed away from your eyes! The bracket looks utterly Heath Robinson and vulnerable. When I pointed this out I was told that the bit which would break if you tripped whilst carrying it would be the bracket, the cheapest part...at £100!

In fairness to Titley and to Chris Corben, this is an excellent idea and has immense potential. Why plug your bat survey data into a computer when you can take the computer to the bats, but there's a lot of work to be done yet. Meanwhile, like many others, I am waiting with baited breath for the new Batbox Griffin to be launched. It just might beat Anabat at their own game.

Chris Corben's Anabat website: http://www.hoarybat.com/
Batbox, makers of the new Griffin: http://www.batbox.com/
GPS Utility: http://www.gpsu.co.uk/
Alan Morton's DMAP mapping programme: http://www.dmap.co.uk/

And of course, my website: http://www.plecotus.co.uk/

Happy Harp Trapping!

2008-08-20T19:02:00.005+01:00

A couple of times this year I have described my Tuttle (or harp) trap, built with the intention of creating an effective trap for harmlessly catching live bats, but smaller and more versatile than the commercially-available traps. Cheaper too! (see The Kitchen Table Harp Trap, February 2008).

Back in May I described the trap's first outing, when it was unfortunately placed over a roost entrance which wasn't in use. (See A Bat in the Hand, May 2008). As the bat maternity season started soon after that I had to wait with gritted teeth for the breeding season to end, so I could find out whether the trap worked or not.

A couple of weeks ago Lothians Bat Group had a trip to a site in the Borders and I set the harp trap up at the entrance to a Daubenton's Bat (Myotis daubentonii) roost and waited with baited breath. With 8 or 10 people waiting to get a close-up view of the bats, I couldn't help dwelling on the fact that the wretched gadget had yet to catch a bat - talk about pressure!

The first 2 or 3 bats flew past the trap, finding ways around it or even through it, causing a sweaty brow on my part. However, this is always a problem with harp trapping at a roost, so after a little work closing the gaps with coats, twigs and anything else that came to hand my fingers were re-crossed.

I got involved in a conversation and missed seeing the first bat to be caught, but yes, a bat was actually caught. My week's hard work back in the winter wasn't in vain after all! It quickly became apparent that the plastic lining of the catching bag was too long, which slowed the bat in moving into the sides of the bag, where it could not get out. In all, twelve Daubies were caught and I was able to check several of them for parasites, watched by some Group members. At the same time, other members of the Group were able to gain some valuable bat handling training.

The trap in place at the Natterer's roost (the roost is in a crevice in the wall behind)

Now that I knew the bat worked I followed up with an evening at a newly-discovered Natterer's Bat (Myotis nattereri) roost in the wall of an old farm steading, where I needed to confirm how the roost was being used. Again, the trap did it's thing and I was able to catch five bats (although a sixth was caught as I was taking the trap down). With three adult females, a juvenile male and a juvenile female, I was able to conclude that this had been a maternity colony, with the young bats now flying and the trap had earned it's place.

A juvenile Natterer's Bat

Before I next use the trap I'll trim back the plastic lining. The only other problem that has come to light is that the legs are a bit spindly and wobbly. The trap is light in weight, so the legs don't need to be too strong, so I'll delay making any changes to that for now. But at last, eight months after building it, I know the trap is fully functional and effective.

Please note, everything described above was carried out under appropriate S.N.H. licences. Trapping and handling bats can be harmful to them if not done with the correct equipment and skills. To do so without a licence is a criminal offence.

My website: http://www.blogger.com/www.plecotus.co.uk

Bat Bugs and Bed Bugs

2008-07-31T18:37:00.007+01:00

I thought I would take the opportunity to share some pictures of a little friend of mine, with a little friend of her own. She's a non-breeding female Soprano Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus), with a low body-weight and in fairly poor condition. When this photo was taken I had just hand-netted her as she emerged from a roost. You can just make out a reddish blob on her wing, which caught my interest. It's a species of bat bug which is widespread in the British Isles, Cimex pipistrelli.

Bat bugs are interesting creatures: members of the family Cimicidae, which also includes human bed bugs, amongst other delightful creatures. The odd thing about this one is it's presence on a bat in flight. They are temporary parasites and are normally found in cracks and crevices in the roost of the host species. They are not equipped to stay attached to a bat in flight and usually leave the host's body as soon as they finish feeding. I can only assume that this one got caught out!

Like all true bugs (bat bugs are Hemiptera, the same order as such familiar sucking insects as Shield Bugs), bat bugs suck their food via tubular mouth-parts. They use this structure, correctly called a rostrum, by inserting it into their host like a hypodermic needle to ingest body fluids. The close-up below shows the rostrum at rest, lying in a groove below the head and prothorax.

It's interesting to note that human bed bugs are thought to be descended from bat bugs, from the days when bats and humans were more closely associated than today. I can imagine Bronze Age or Neolithic people living in huts, with perhaps Brown Long-eared Bats roosting in the rafters and bat bugs gradually adapting to this larger and less difficult host.

If the pictures haven't given you the creeps, then this will: it's an article from the Lancet, which describes a house in Scotland, where a student was being bitten by what were initially thought to be human bed bugs. They turned out to be bat bugs, wandering from a roost above his bedroom. Fortunately for bat conservation, this seems to have been an isolated situation! http://www.morgellons-uk.net/pdf/bats.pdf

My website: http://www.blogger.com/www.plecotus.co.uk

Peat Bogs, Rape Fields & Other Nasty Places at Night

2008-07-19T20:04:00.003+01:00

I've just returned from a week-long soiree in the northern half of Scotland. Not a holiday, I'm sorry to say, but a surveying trip, working at some wind-farm sites.

Surveying wind farms is different from most bat survey work, for two reasons. Firstly, the focus is on finding commuting and foraging bats in the vicinity of proposed turbines, rather than the usual roost-finding focus of most commercial surveys. Secondly, proposed wind farms tend to be in places where no sane bat might be expected to go: exposed, windy places and bats don't usually go together.

The difficulty faced by developers (and their consultant ecologists) is that we don't know enough about how bats commute and migrate around the UK. We know that much migration takes place in continental climates, such as in mainland Europe and North America. We also know that in these places badly sited wind farms can kill many bats. So, until we understand what our own bats in the UK are doing, we do intensive surveys of wind farm sites.

Thus I came to be trekking around various nasty places in the middle of the night, carrying out 5 minute activity surveys at 100m intervals, along transects which took 4 or 5 hours to complete. Fair enough, but when the first site was a called ***** Moss I realised things could get interesting. First came the midges - hordes of the little swine, but I was ready for them with my midge hood. I amused myself squirting them with Jungle Formula and watching them zoom back for second helpings, fangs dripping with my blood (it doesn't matter how much anti-midge gear you wear - they always find a way through).

The next piece of fun was the gradual fading out of the track I was following across the site. Having got lost twice in the dark and had to GPS may way back to a known point on the transect, my sense of humour was beginning to fail me. A quick look at the site plan revealed I needed to follow a fence line for the next part of the transect. I'm not entirely sure why the soggy peat that surrounded that fence didn't suck it down, but it made up for it with me. I consider myself a patient man, but I do recall howling into the wind, as I pulled myself out of my third bog hole, holding the precious Anabat over my head "Wind farm? As far as I'm concerned, they can TARMAC the bas***ding place !!!!".

The next site seemed more civilised, at least from a survey point of view, if not an ecological one. A prairie-sized arable farm, with hardly a hedgerow to be seen and every crop planted close up to the field boundaries. It looked easy enough to traverse, until I met the delights of mature Oilseed Rape. This stuff stood higher than me, stank like Satan's bottom and did it's best to trip me up with it's stout stems as I tried to navigate the eighteen-inch gap between the crop and the barbed-wire fence. But the real problem was the Cleavers. You know, Cleavers, Galium aparine a.k.a. Sticky-weed, Goose Grass etc? Harmless, amiable stuff? Not when it grows in great swathes, fed with nitrogen by the Rape. It grew taller than me, with stems as thick as my little finger, twisting round itself to create a miniature jungle of impenetrability, constantly tripping me up in the dark as I tried to force a way through.

A bat surveyor's lot is not a happy one etc. etc.

Oh, and bats? Surprise, surprise, there were very few and mostly in the obvious places round the edges of the sites.

I said "mostly" and what was interesting was that both sites produced snippets of bat behaviour that went against the books and perhaps justifies some of the survey effort expended at these sites. First, I watched a Common Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) patrolling up and down a track, feeding on midges. The odd thing was this track was in the middle of a wind-swept moss, without hedgerow, fence or any kind of above-ground feature.

The second interesting thing was a small colony of Common Pipistrelles dispersing from their roost across arable land. Some were following field boundaries, as you might expect, one followed the route of a former field boundary (working from memory?) and I watched another set a course across open arable fields.

We still have a lot to learn about these animals...

My website: www.plecotus.co.uk

Swarming Pipistrelle Video

2008-06-29T15:07:00.003+01:00

A few weeks ago I included a brief snippet of video, showing a colony of Soprano Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) swarming at dawn, before entering their roost. I have now had opportunity to film a longer video with a larger colony.

The video was recorded between about 04.10 and 05.00 on a morning when dawn was around 04.30. A colony count the evening before showed that 383 bats left the roost. I hand-netted two of them and both were lactating females, indicating that this is a maternity colony. When I filmed them it was too early in the maternity season for the young to be flying, but in just a few weeks there will probably be double this number of bats, as each young bat starts to follow it's mother out to feed at night.

The video shows up to fifty bats at a time swarming and there are close-ups of one of the roost entrances, showing how the bats "touch and go" at the entrance, without actually entering. At times, so many bats were attempting to do so that there was an aerial queue and the clattering on the wooden barge-board as they touched and pushed off again was audible some distance away.

Enjoy!

My web-site www.plecotus.co.uk

Welsh Bats and Scottish Bat-workers

2008-06-26T22:09:00.003+01:00

Last weekend I made the long trek to Aberystwyth - a 7 hour drive each way - for the B.C.T. Welsh Bat Conference. Organised by Tom McOwat and hosted by Aberystwyth University, this was an excellent conference at a reasonable charge (even for us consultants, who usually pay extra). A pleasant surprise was the discovery that no less than nine of us were travelling down from Scotland, so with a bit of hectic organisation everyone squeezed into two cars and we did our small bit to save the planet and avoid having to remortgage the house to buy a tank of petrol.

There were a number of good talks. It would be remiss of me not to mention the two Scots: John Haddow describing tips for identifying bats in the hand and Kirsty Park on bats in man-made habitats.

Another highlight for me was Helen Miller describing BCT's new survey programme for the rare Bechstein's bat. This rare woodland bat is extremely hard to survey for: they fly fast and cover large distances, so the survey method employs an actic technique: using ultrasonic lures to attract Bechsteins into harp traps by broadcasting their social calls. Very clever, and with a strict methodology that minimises disruption to the bats.

Another fascinating talk was by Chris Corben, the innovative Australian who designed the Anabat system, which is revolutionising professional bat-work. The Anabat SD1 is a frequency division detector which saves data direct to a CF memory card. It allows effective long-term monitoring of bats and is increasingly finding a place in transect work too. With the associated Analook software, which is designed to work with frequency division data (unlike Batsound etc, which use audio files) it is astonishingly easy to analyse large numbers of bat passes swiftly and efficiently.

A very clever idea incorporated into the conference was the usual evening bat-walk. Except it wasn't the usual one. Instead, all the delegates were divided into teams and spread out over twelve woodland sites around Ceredigion. The result: a far greater survey effort in one night than most bat groups could manage in a year. And to validate the results, the Sunday morning session comprised analysis workshops for the various software programmes.

Naturally, the Scottish bat hooligan squad had to push things to the limit. Not satisified with six bat species in our patch of woodland (including a possible Nathusius' Pipistrelle - a very rare species), we wanted more. We set out to look for Lesser Horseshoes, which we were told had been recorded at a road widening scheme a few miles from Aberystwyth. Imagine the scene: a car bursting with wild bat enthusiasts and literally bristling with bat detectors, careering down a Welsh country road in the middle of the night. We had three Bat-box Duets poking out of the sun-roof (set to 20, 50 and 120 kHz), an Anabat SD1 poking out of the side window and one intrepid bat-worker (who shall remain nameless) hunched in the passenger seat, monitoring the frequency division output of one of the Duets, just in case a bat escaped all the other detectors.

So, did we get any Horseshoes? Did we heck. But at least we have an excuse to go back to Wales...if they'll have us!

My website: www.plecotus.co.uk

More on the Bechstein's Project: http://www.bats.org.uk/pages/bechsteins_bat_project.html

Chris Corben and Anabat: www.hoarybat.com

A Rant About Planning

2008-06-24T05:20:00.003+01:00

Early in 2007 the Scottish Government (or was it still the Scottish Executive then?) wrote to all local authorities in Scotland, clearly setting out their responsibilities in relation to European Protected Species (which include all UK bat species) and the planning process. What they said includes some very simple guidance: "...it is clearly essential that planning permission is not granted without the planning authority having satisfied itself that the proposed development either will not impact adversely on any European protected species on the site or that, in its opinion, all three tests necessary for the eventual grant of a Regulation 44 licence are likely to be satisfied." Surely that isn't hard to understand?

Why then, are some local authorities still granting planning permission for developments without giving the slightest consideration to protected species? Edinburgh are the worst offenders I know of, but I'm sure there are others. I have recently seen a development involving the direct destruction of a known roost. I was called in by the owner to give advice on how to proceed and was appalled to discover that planning permission had already been granted.

On the other hand, some local authorities are diligent: the planners at Scottish Borders Council not only make it clear to applicants what species need to be surveyed for, they provide succinct guidance, written by the county ecologist and clearly focused on the individual development.

This process is the safety net through which pointless destruction of bat roosts can be prevented: ensuring developers and others face their responsibilities towards protected species and helping them understand what they need to do and when. It's basic and essential conservation law.

My other frustration is the local authorities who approach their Habitats Directive responsibilities with a "one size fits all" approach. One west of Scotland local authority responds to planning applications by setting out what programme of surveys must be carried out, without knowledge of the characteristics of the site or it's bat potential. Yet the BCT Bat Survey Guidelines are clear: "It is worth noting that the type of survey to be undertaken and amount of effort expended can often only be fully determined after visiting the site at least once." I recently completed a pointless set of sunset surveys at a modern city centre building with very low bat potential, no nearby or connected habitat and no records of bat activity in the area. The local authority's ecologist insisted on his standard litany of "two to three emergence surveys", with no mention of an initial inspection survey. After I carried one out it was abundantly clear that no further survey was necessary, but was obliged to do so anyway. As a result, the developers have been delayed, have paid over the odds and are disillusioned with the whole process. In other words, conservation has been discredited by thoughtless actions.

For all I know, their next development could be a steading conversion surrounded by prime habitat: a building with high bat potential. After their bad experience at this site, they could be tempted to turn a blind eye to protected species. If the local authority is one of those which does the same, the result could easily be the destruction of an ecologically sensitive roost.

Rant over (climbs down from soapbox).

Pipistrelle Roosts: from Intermediate to Maternity

2008-06-10T10:41:00.007+01:00

The roosting cycle of the commoner UK bat species is reasonably well understood: hibernaculum in winter, then move to an intermediate roost in spring. In the breeding season, the females move into maternity roosts and in most species the males use other sites. Once the young are flying in late summer, intermediate roosts become important again, with mating roosts used in some species, then it's back to hibernacula. More often than not, we only see little snippets of this and have to work hard to interpret what we see. I've been lucky enough to see a slightly bigger piece of the picture with two Soprano Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) roosts I've been working with recently.

The first is the site at which I videoed swarming bats in May ("Dawn Swarming", 15 May). On that occasion I saw around 70 bats swarming, 30 of which entered the roost, the remainder flying off to the north-east. We know of another roost about 500m away in that direction, so clearly there was likey to be a link. Last week I returned at sunset to do a colony count and volunteers from Lothians Bat Group went to the other roost site to the same thing simultaneously. 48 bats had been counted at the other site a week previously, so I was intrigued to see which roost would be used for breeding.

Unexpectedly, only three bats emerged from "my" roost. I hand-netted one of them, which turned out to be a very small non-breeding female. She was in poor condition and was carrying an enormous (by Pipistrelle standards) Cimex bat-bug (a close relative of the human bed bug) on one wing and huge numbers of Macronyssidae (a family of tiny mites).

Incidentally, it's quite unusual to see a bat-bug attached to a bat outside of the roost. They are not really equipped to grip on to a rapidly moving wing for long and normally feed from bats within the roost, dropping off before the bats emerge, so it looks like this one got caught out! It's probably Cimex pipistrelli, but there are records of another, rarer Cimex species on bats and I'll reserve judgment until I have it under the microscope.

Here you can clearly see the Bat-bug (Cimex sp.) on the bat's wing

And the other site? Only thirty bats emerged, suggesting that the maternity roost is probably somewhere else entirely. What we now need is someone mad enough to prowl the streets of Edinburgh at dawn for a few days, looking for a swarm of bats, to tell us where the maternity roost is! It's not that we really need to know, but it would be nice to find the missing jigsaw piece.

The other site is the one I mentioned in February ("Two Roosts for the Price of One", 6 February), with droppings of two species in the attics. As yet the Brown Long-eareds (if my dropping analysis is correct) haven't put in an appearance. At dawn one morning in May, I watched 7-10 Soprano Pipistrelles swarming around the gable end of the "wrong roof", i.e. the attic which did not have Pipistrelle droppings in it in February. Did I have it all wrong? Was the maternity roost actually here?

(Above) The roost entrance identified in May - the bats swarmed in front of this gable end and entered via the gap visible below one of the roof tiles

(Below) Droppings stuck to the timber facing below it, 3 weeks later

When I returned with a team of helpers at sunset last week, there were many droppings stuck to the wall around the access hole the bats had been using on the previous visit, indicating it had seen some use. However, at sunset no bats emerged from there. Instead, 118 bats emerged from two holes in the gable end of the main attic, right where I originally found piles of droppings within the attic. So, not only were we able to confirm the location of the maternity roost, the May visit enabled the identification of an intermediate roost, which wasn't apparent from signs within the attic.

Bats are always enigmatic and rarely give up their secrets easily. It's nice when, once in a while, we can see tiny bit more of their lives than the usual tiny snap-shots...

My website: http://ww.plecotus.co.uk/

Ten Things Every Duet Owner Should Know

2008-05-22T12:19:00.003+01:00

Last night I was surveying for emerging bats that didn't emerge, so I had plenty of time to think about life, the bats and everything. It occurred to me that the detector I was using, a Bat Box Duet is of the most popular detectors on the market, and rightly so. It's sensitive, selective, ergonomic, robust and sensibly priced.

As with any piece of equipment, there are hints and tips that help the user, some of which I've picked up from other users and some I've worked out myself. So here are my ten top tips for using a Bat Box Duet:

1. Try plugging your headphones into the tape socket, instead of the headphones socket. You will hear the heterodyne detector in your right ear and the frequency division one in your left. Whatever frequency the detector is set to, you will still be aware of bats on other frequencies. The audio level is fixed, so the volume control has no effect: if you're beside a road or river you may struggle to hear over the background noise.

2. If you want to try this technique somewhere where there is some background noise, try plugging the detector into a minidisc machine and plugging your headphones into the minidisc. You should hear the audio from the bat detector and the minidisc volume control will allow you to hear it louder. This is good practice when recording, as it allows you to be confident that the detector output is being recorded properly. It's very frustrating to get to the end of a survey and find you've recorded nothing because you accidentally knocked the stop button or a plug has come out.

3. When the low battery BAT warning appears on the display, don't panic if you haven't brought a spare battery: the detector will continue to function for a short while. Eventually the frequency indication will go haywire and then the detector will switch off the display to save power, but the detector will still operate for a little while longer.

4. Even in that situation you can by without the frequency display. Although you don't know what frequency you're tuned to, if you rub your fingers together, this sound will be loudest at 40kHz, giving you a very rough frequency indication. Of course, its a lot easier just to carry a spare battery!

5. Have you ever wondered why a seemingly random digit appears when you first switch the detector on? This is the software version.

6. If you have a childish sense of humour (like me) you can convince gullible people you have a very clever detector. Using a worn battery, turn the volume high, without headphones. The loudspeaker is the most power-hungry part of the detector so, when a bat is picked up, the extra current consumption will cause the word BAT to appear. When the call ends, the word disappears again. Fun for all the family!

7. Fed up tuning up and down, to ensure you don't miss any bats? Try tuning to 42kHz. You'll hear Myotis calls as a regular machine-gun type call, Common Pipistrelles as an irregular, thudding and Sopranos as an irregular squeaky sound. Noctules can be hear when close, as this frequency is close to the first harmonic of their call. For heaven's sake don't try this for anything important: you will lose a lot of sensitivity, and you may miss something important (especially Horseshoe bats) but it's handy if you just want a general idea of what's happening. I sometimes do this when I set up a Duet on a tripod to record the frequency division output. In that situation I know everything is being safely recorded, so missing the odd call is less important.

8. Did you know there have been some subtle changes in the design of the Duet since it first came out? Earlier versions had a less sensitive microphone, which looks like a small black plastic grille. the later, more sensitive microphone looks like a tiny metal disc, surrounded by a rubber grommet.

9. Another change is the function of the REF button. In earlier versions this produced a steady reference tone. With more recent Duets, this button shunts the microphone to normal audio. This is handy for taking field notes, as anything you say into the detector will be picked up on the left-hand stereo track and recorded (assuming you are recording the survey). Be sparing in it's use: whilst you are talking the frequency division detector is inactive.

10. I only had nine things, so for number ten I'll mention that the Bat Box III has now been revamped into the same style of case as the Duet. I have yet to get my hands on one, but I suspect it will be a very good heterodyne detector. The original Bat Box III was excellent, but it's only weaknesses were poor ergonomics and difficult frequency indication. The new version (Bat Box IIID) fixes both of those issues and will probably be a really good little brother for the Duet.

The Stag Electronics (Bat-box) website: http://www.batbox.com/

My website: plecotus.co.uk

A Bat in the Hand....

2008-05-21T17:05:00.011+01:00

...takes a great deal of work to achieve!

In company with a small group of people from Lothians and Scottish Borders bat groups I attempted to try out my new harp trap last night (see "The Kitchen Table Harp Trap", under February 2008).

The site was a ruined castle, set in a secluded valley in the Scottish Borders. "Ruin" is probably the wrong word, as the seventeenth century noble who set about building it never completed the job but, with massive stone walls up to 50 feet high, it really looks the part. Barrel-vaulted cellars with plenty of deep gaps and cracks in the stonework provide good roosting opportunities for bats. There are woods and a river close at hand, providing foraging opportunities for several bat speices and in the past we have trapped Natterer's Bats (Plecotus nattereri), Daubenton's (Myotis daubentonii) and Brown Long-eareds (Plecotus auritus).

Trapping bats is enjoyable, but there needs to be a valid scientific reason to interrupt the bats in their normal activity. On this occasion bats were to be rung as part of a long-running study of bats using sites of this type in the Scottish Borders. In addition, I was planning to remove parasite specimens as part of my studies into their distribution and host associations.

Two harp traps were put in place: mine and a slightly larger one, each covering the entrance to one of the cellars. There is an art to siting a harp trap: it needs to cover as much of the entrance as possible and gaps need to be filled as far as possible, to prevent bats flying round the trap. A tarpaulin, some leafy twigs and an old coat were pressed into service around my trap:

It was quite cold, dipping as low as 5 degrees centigrade after sunset and bat activity wasn't high, apart from the large numbers of Soprano Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) dispersing from their roost in a nearby farmhouse. Nonetheless, we caught four male Daubenton's, all of which emerged from one of the cellars. Frustratingly, it wasn't the cellar which had my trap at the entrance!

Two of the bats were recaptures and had been rung on previous visits to the site, but the other two were new and, as well as being weighed and having their forearm length measured, each had a tiny numbered aluminium ring slid onto it's forearm.

None of the bats had many parasites. This is often the case in spring, especially with adult males, which usually carry a lower parasite burden than females and juveniles. They are able to move between roosts to avoid parasite accumulation, whereas the females and juveniles are together in the maternity roost for several weeks each year, often with many other bats. I like to think that juvenile bats may also have similar personal hygiene issues to many human teenagers!

The picture above shows the fouth bat to be caught, who caught my interest as he had a tromiculid mite larva in his ear. The Trombiculidae are a large family of mites, including members of the genus Leptotrombidia, which parasitise bats for part of their life-cycle. Their larvae hatch within a bat roost, climb onto a bat and attach themselves, often in the bat's ear or on the forearm. There they take a meal, before dropping off the bat to become predators of other small arthropods within the roost during their nymph and adult phases.

I was particularly interested, as there are very few records of these parasites on British bats, partly because records of any bat parasites are rare and partially because they can be difficult to remove. Fortunately, this bat was quite placid and, with Carol-Ann (the "bat whisperer") holding him, I was able to paint the mite with a little isopropyl alcohol using a very fine brush, to make it release it's grip, and then remove it with fine soft forceps.

Once home I checked and have been unable to find any records of a trombiculid mite on a Daubenton's bat in the UK (unless anyone reading this knows better?), although that doesn't necessarily make it a rare species: probably just an under-recorded one. It will probably be a while before I am able to positively identify it to species: there are no field guides!

I haven't mounted the mite yet, but here's a rough and ready picture taken at x120. The larvae are usually a distinctive orange colour when seen on a bat. With their mouthparts buried in the bat, they look like tiny orange jelly beans.

As for the harp trap, it is still waiting to be christened with it's first bat. Watch this space...

Please note, trapping and handling bats without proper equipment, training and experience can be very harmful. Furthermore, in the UK it is illegal to do so without appropriate licences from Scottish Natural Heritage, Natural England, the Countryside Council for Wales or the Environment and Hritage Service in Northern Ireland.

If you're interested in getting involved in working with bats, the best starting point is your local bat group: http://www.bats.org.uk/bat_group.php

A checklist of mites found on British bats can be downloaded here: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/acarology/saas/saasp/2003/saasp14.pdf

My website: plecotus.co.uk

What is it About Bat Surveys...?

2008-05-15T23:07:00.007+01:00

Maybe it's the peculiar hours that bat-workers keep, or maybe it's the association with unusual animals, but there's a definite tendency for odd occurances and very odd characters to be encountered whilst doing bat survey work.

The people we meet range from the scarily enthusiastic, through the utterly barking and the dangerously misinformed to the simply peculiar. On one survey for Daubenton's Bats alongside a canal a bewhiskered Wing Commander type approached me and barked an enquiry as to what we were doing. When I told him he replied "That's alright then: I thought you might be looking for otters." I should probably have extricated myself there and then, but my curiosity got the better of me and I asked why he might ask that. In return I was treated to an extensive diatribe on the evils of the poor otter: how it kills lambs, despoils the countryside, wrecks fishing and probably bears off virgin maidens, causes global warming and harbours Osama bin Laden in it's holt. Where he had got all this rubbish from wasn't clear but it was obvious from the gleam in his eye that his opinions weren't open for discussion and I beat a hasty retreat.

On another occasion I was carrying out a dawn survey in a small park in Livingston, not a town noted for it's ethnic diversity. Just before dawn an enormous black gentleman jogged purposefully towards me, wearing colourful, flowing West African robes and fez hat and carrying a huge carved staff. He padded past me on bare feet without a sideways glance. Ten minutes later he returned in the opposite direction, still with the same purposeful, steady gait and again he acted as though I wasn't there, leaving me wondering if I was dreaming (at 4.30 in the morning that's entirely possible!).

In a town noted for it's UFO sightings I had to attend to a remote bat detector with odd noises emerging from it's radio receiver. When I reached it, I found two men with the case of the detector open, staring at the electronic gadgetry inside. I introduced myself and asked what they were doing. Their candid reply was that they though it might be a bomb, so they had opened it to see. What degree of utter stupidity led them to decide that it was a good idea to open a suspected bomb? Then again, perhaps they had a point: an Anabat detector belonging to the Highways Agency was recently destroyed by the Bomb Squad in a controlled explosion after it was found attached to a motorway bridge.

It's sometimes hard to understand chiropterophobia (or fear of bats), but for those it affects it is a very real problem. Last year I was checking a heated bat box on Ministry of Defence property. The sergeant on duty was built like the proverbial brick sh**-house: his muscles probably had muscles and I had no doubt that he could probably kill me with his little finger, whilst drinking a mug of NAAFI tea with the other hand. Nonetheless, it seemed a good opportunity to attempt some bat PR, so I explained what we had found and tried to show him a photograph on my camera. In a trice he was on his feet, backing away and shaking. I swear, if I hadn't calmed him down he would have reversed straight though the wall.

I was recently asked to look over some derelict council flats for any signs of roosting bats: a long day of methodically working through attic after attic. I expected them to be empty, as the occupants had long gone, but almost every attic was a treasure trove of the weird. One contained a knitting machine and enough wool to keep a knitware factory supplied for months. Another contained most of the body panels for a Ford Escort. Even odder was the attic in which several hundredweight of soil was lying in heaps, reminiscent of the PoW hut roofs in The Great Escape. Why? How? Your guess is as good as mine.

In case anyone reading this is feeling put off bat work I should stress that the odd situations and people are outweighed many times over by enormous numbers of warm-hearted, helpful and interested members of the public.... but the other sort are far more entertaining!

Please remember that some of the bat work described here requires a licence, issued by one of the four statutory nature conservation organisations. It is an offence to disturb bats or their roosts without one.

My website: plecotus.co.uk

Dawn Swarming

2008-05-15T20:44:00.005+01:00

Someone once said that bats are hard to study "...because you can't see them and you can't hear them." It's certainly true that they don't give away their secrets easily, though bat detectors have allowed us to start the long hard job of understanding them.

A behaviour exhibited by most British bats which tips the balance a little on our side is dawn swarming, in whcih bats returning to a roost fly around the roost entrance for a period of time at dawn, often making false landings at the roost entrance. In doing so they give away the roost location. This is in stark contrast to evening emergence, when they dive out of the roost, flying hell for leather to avoid any possible predators, making it hard to spot where they have emerged from!

Of course the downside is that dawn is a horribly antisocial time of day to be about, something I was reminded of when my alarm clock went off at 2.45 am this morning. With dawn in Edinburgh at 5 am I wanted to be alongside a roost site at a suburban house well beforehand, to watch swarming develop. It wasn't just for fun: I had a suite of things I needed to know about these bats. All I knew was where the roost entrance was: at the end of a flat roof bargeboard, giving access to a hollow wall; and that they were Pipistrelles. I needed to find out which species they were, whether they were roosting in any other parts of the building and approximately how may bats roosted there.

For the first half hour there were steady comings and goings, with Soprano Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) entering and leaving the roost in small groups and occasional bats flying close to the entrance in twos and threes. At 4.25 am swarming started, with numbers gradually building up to a peak five minutes before dawn, with around 60-70 bats zooming round the adjacent garden. You can see a brief snippet of the action here:

Soon after this bats started to enter the roost. Up until this point, everything was as I expected: no other part of the house roof was involved, I knew the species of bat and could see an approximate number. All I had to do was count them as they entered the roost, giving an accurate count and the job was done...or was it?

Only 30 bats actually entered the roost. The remainder gradually gained height until they were around 5-10m higher then the house, then one by one they flew off to the north-east. I have never heard of this behaviour before and was quite astonished to see it. Stuart Smith, of Lothians Bat group was later able to tell me of another roost site about half a kilometre away in that direction, so perhaps that is where they were heading. It is quite common for a colony to move around between several roost sites, but I have never before heard of them swarming at one site and then splitting up, to roost in mor than one location.

Whatever the cause, it was worth being up early to see the spectacle: the video doesn't really do it justice!

My website: plecotus.co.uk

The Hunting of the Noctule

2008-05-08T19:20:00.005+01:00

For some time I have been rather fascinated by Noctule bats (Nyctalus noctula). One of Britian's largest bats, they emerge from their roosts earlier than other species and fly high abve pastures and river valleys, dipping down to catch larger insects. With a very loud call (reputedly louder than the legal safe limit for audible sound), their distinctive "CHIP CHOP" can often be heard from several hundred metres away.

You can hear a Noctule here: http://www.plecotus.net/noctule.mp3
(It was recorded in the Scottish Borders, using a hetereodyne bat detector set to 22kHz).

Traditionally they have been assumed to be largely absent from Scotland, apart from Dumfries and Galloway. It has been known for a while that the occasional Noctule turns up in the Scottish Borders and that there is a small population in the Tweed valley. More recently, there have a handful of records from reputable sources of Noctules in the Lothians, which led some bat-workers to query whether they are more widely spread than previously thought.

I set out to try to clarify this, by gathering together records from many sources across the Lothians and Borders area. I eventually gathered 41 records, from across the region, ranging from audio recordings validated by reputable ecologists to visual records of "large bats". That sounds like a lot of records, but they range over a period of eight years and twenty of these records relate to just 4 sites.

You can see a map of these sites here: http://www.plecotus.net/noctuleatlas.jpg

Hoping to locate more of these bats, I decided to use a variation on the car survey method, used for the Bat Conservation Trust Bats and Roadside Mammals Survey. This very successful technique involves driving at twenty miles an hour along country roads, with a bat detector poking out of the window, allowing many records to made in areas where bat-workers are thin on the ground (See below for the detailed method).

My theory was that, by doubling the speed to 40mph, a lot of ground could be covered in one session: typically 80miles in a session. The Noctule is a loud, high-flying bat, so mounting the detector on the roof and travelling faster should be feasible. The detector could be linked to the car stero with a wireless link, so that it's output would be clearly heard and we could stop and investigate when we heard anything suspiciously Noctule-ish. Thus, two nights ago, with Nigel acting as navigator, we set off in a vehicle decorated with rotating amber beacon and reflective warning sign to drive down the Tweed Valley and test the theory.

It was a perfect evening for bats: warm, dry and with plenty of flying insects around. We encountered an initial problem with air moving over the detector's microphone, causing unacceptable levels of background noise. This necessitated a speed reduction down to 30mph, after which the system seemed to work well and we soon started to hear Pipistrelles.

As a slight cheat we paused by the Dryburgh Suspension Bridge at Newtown St Boswells, a spot where there is usually a Noctule or two. Sure enough, a Noctule flew past and we could clearly hear it. Further on we crossed the Tweed at Coldstream and, after negotiating an unexpected diversion we found another bat near Wark. This was certainly a Nyctalus bat, but it is just possible it could have been a Leisler's Bat (Nyctalus leislerii). We heard only a couple of brief passes and the Leisler's has a similar call. Typically, we had two hand-held detectors linked to minidisk recorders and both failed at the same time! Without a recording to analyse and verify the bat's call we have to simply call it Nyctalus sp. Nonetheless, it proved that this variation on the BCT method is effective and worth persevering with.

You may ask, why not use the standard method? Firstly, 20mph is simply too slow to cover the vast amount of ground we need to survey and 30mph appears to work with these louder, high-flying bats. Secondly, the standard method requires some very expensive equipment and teams of four people, both factors which could be limiting. That in no way negates the amazing work that has been achieved by people in the UK, Ireland and elswehere using the BCT method.

The plan is now to carry out more surveys this year, focussing particularly on habitat that seems likely to be suitable for Noctules. To avoid making the same mistake twice, the audio from the roof-mounted detector will be fed via a lap-top, so that a permanent record can be made.

Anyone fancy a drive in the country?....

The standard method: http://www.ibats.org.uk/page.aspx?tabid=256

My web-site: plecotus.co.uk

Spring Has Sprung....

2008-05-08T18:38:00.005+01:00

Three weeks ago I asked whether spring was springing yet, at least in terms of bat behaviour. We can safely say that Spring has now sprung. The chart below shows the night-time temperatures at Gogarbank meteorological station, near Edinburgh, since 1 April. It clearly shows that, after a brief blip at the start o last month, followed by a colder period, the warmer weather is now settling in.

(Met Office Data)

Last night Lothians Bat Group members returned to Blackford Pond and we found a big difference to the events of three weeks ago. For a start, we didn't have to tiptoe through hordes of amorous toads! Of more interest to us was the big increase in bat activity. At least 4 or 5 Daubenton's Bats (Myotis daubetonii) were foraging over the pond and finding plenty of invertebrates to eat. Above the footpaths were many Soprano Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) and one or two Common Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pipistrellus).

Whilst we were there, I was able to hook a frequency division bat detector up to a lap-top running Batsound software alongside the pond. Newer members of the group were able to see sonograms of the common species and compare them with the sounds, to help get a handle on the basics of bat call identification.

To give a flavour of the evening, here's a brief video clip showing two of the Daubenton's Bats over the pond last night. You can hear a heterodyne bat detector in the background.

We mustn't leave out the Pipistrelles: the most charming and delightful to watch of our native bat species. Here's a very short clip of a Soprano Pipistrelle feeding just before dawn this week, at another site in Edinburgh.

My website: plecotus.co.uk

Connecting Bat Detectors to Audio Equipment

2008-04-29T15:55:00.005+01:00

This is the time of year when bat survey equipment starts to get dusted off and checked over, ready for the new survey season. Top of the list of course is the bat detector ( I can't even begin to understand what it must have been like to survey for bats before portable detectors was available).

Many bat-workers make recordings of bat calls they hear in the field, either so they can have a second attempt at identifying a bat at home, with a glass of something warming or, in the case of frequency division or time expansion detectors, to look at calls using Batsound or other call analysis software. I thought this would be an opportune moment to look at the connections between the detector, the recording equipment and the computer. It seems simple enough, but there are a few easy errors, which are less obvious than might be expected.

To understand how to connect things properly we first need to understand a couple of techy things about jack plugs and sockets:

Jack Plugs
There are several types of audio jack plugs, but virtually everything we are interested in uses 3.5mm jacks. There are two types: mono and stereo. The stereo plug is connected to three wires: one common and one for each of two audio channels (normally used to create that "close your eyes and visualise the orchestra" effect by producing slightly different versions of a music track in each ear). The mono plug has only two wires and, you've guessed it, only one audio channel.

Where it gets slightly tricky is that the mono and stereo jacks are the same size and fit into sockets intended for one another.

Sockets
There are four types of audio socket found on bat detectors and recording equipment:

1. Audio out (also labelled as headphone or speakers) is the socket on the detector or recorder which squirts out sound. The level is controlled by the volume control.
2. Line out (often labelled record) is the same as audio out, but with a steady volume, unaffected by the volume control.
3. Line in (also called audio in or sound input) is the socket on the recorder or PC through which the equipment receives audio.
4. Microphone in is similar to audio input, but is easily overloaded, as microphones produce very low level audio.

That's the geek stuff over. So, why does it matter? Most bat detectors are mono. As the two types of jack plug are interchangeable it doesn't really matter which we use. In fact it's helpful that they're interchangeable as it means stereo headphones can be used. A bog-standard stereo jack to stereo jack lead can be bought at Comet to connect the detector to a digital audio recorder, minidisc recorder or cassette recorder. Incidentally, avoid cassette recorders: the tape speed falls as the battery runs down, turning Common Pipistrelle calls into Nathusius' ones.

It's always advisable to connect the line out soocket on the detector to the line in socket on the recording equipment. That way, the machines take care of the audio levels and we can get on with looking at bats. Life being the way it is, some machines don't have these sockets, so we have to get a bit sneaky.

If there's no line out (or record) socket on the detector, it's necessary to use the headphone socket (and plug the headphones into the recorder's headphone socket, so we can hear what's happening), but it's necessary to make a few experimental recordings to work out what level the detector volume needs to be set to, to produce the clearest recordings.

If there's no line in on the recorder then it's necessary to use the microphone in socket, taking care not to overload it by having the detector volume set too high. The recorder's automatic level control will cause the background white noise to increase when there;s no sound, but it should drop the moment a bat is picked up.

The Bat-Box Duet
Things get more complex when using a Duet. These are excellent detectors, allowing the user to listen to a heterodyne detector, whilst recording what the user hears and the sound from a frequency division detector, one on each stereo channel. This permits later computer analysis. Admittedly, the sonograms produced are not quite as perfect as those made with recordings from a time expansion detector, but they're usually good enough for most purposes and it's much easier to use (anyway, how many hobby bat-workers can afford to pay a grand for a time expansion detector?)

The Duet achieves it's cleverness by using the two stereo channels: left for the frequency division audio and right for the heterodyne audio. As long as the recording equipment is also stereo then a standard stereo jack to stereo jack lead can be used. However, some digital audio recorders only have a mono microphone input. If you put a stereo jack in here the machine will record a weird amalgam of the output of both detectors. A cable which splits the stereo into the two mono outputs is required - see below. You need to go to a specialist shop like Tandy or Maplin, or if you're handy with a soldering iron, make one yourself.

The other difficulty comes when you replay the bat calls into a computer. If you don't have a line in socket on your computer the microphone socket may work, but it will be mono, rather than stereo, so the same cable is required.

Incidentally, if you're buying a minidisk recorder for use with a bat detector, check the line in socket carefully. Most have some sort of audio input, even if there's no line in socket, but a generation of minidisk players exists where the line in socket is a weird digital thing which looks like a 3.5mm jack socket, but simply doesn't work, except to record from other digital equipment.

Of course, all this should soon be academic, as we move towards bat detectors with built-in memory cards. Hopefully that will make redundant the geeky knowledge I acquired from my youth, spent making dodgy cassette recordings of LPs......

The BCT have published a useful guide to recording with digital equipment: http://www.bats.org.uk/helpline/documents/Digitalrecordingwithbatdetectors_005.pdf

More about the Bat-Box Duet: http://www.batbox.com/duet.html

My website: plecotus.co.uk

Finally, if you follow any advice here, you do so at your own risk.

Is spring springing yet?

2008-04-15T13:42:00.007+01:00

When does Spring start? According to the Met Office, spring starts on 1 March, although the traditional start is the vernal equinox, on the night of 21/22 March. Here we are in mid April, so surely spring has started?

From a wildlife point of view, spring activity starts when the prevailing weather conditions permit, so in truth it's quite a variable thing, not just in terms of date, but geographically. The south of England is likely to experience signs of spring one or two weeks before they appear here in Scotland.

With some members of Lothians Bat Group, I went to Edinburgh's Blackford Pond after sunset, one evening last week. If you live in Edinburgh this is a great place to see large numbers of Daubenton's Bats (Myotis daubentonii) and Soprano Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) in the summer, and the group usually run a bat walk there every year. On this occasion we wanted to see if there were the first signs of bats emerging from hibernation yet.

With an ambient temperature after sunset of just 2.5 degrees celsius, it was questionable whether we'd see any bats at all, but what was probably a lone Soprano Pipistrelle passed by a couple of times and we watched one, and later two Daubenton's Bats feeding on the pond. There was very little food for them, so they were having to range over the whole of this large pond, to find enough flying insects to eat (they looked to be small Sedge Flies). With such a low temperature, it's possible that these few bats were some of last year's juveniles, desperate for food after the long months of hibernation.

So is it spring? Well, not really from a bat point of view, as it seems like the main population are still in hibernation. The graph below shows the night-time temperatures at the Gogarmor meteorological station, to the west of Edinburgh, since the start of April. As you can see, there was a brief peak of warmer temperatures at the start of the month, but it has been quite cold at night since then.

Having said that, there are other signs of spring. As we walked around Blackford Pond, we had to tread carefully to avoid a large number of toads, commuting towards the pond, in order to mate?

Since then I have also seen some discarded eggshell from what must be a very optimistic bird and last weekend, I watched a group of Brown Hares (Lepus europaeus), boxing and chasing each other: the so-called "mad march hare" behaviour, associated with the onset of the breeding season. This behaviour actually continues through to September, but is far more noticeable just now, whilst the grass is short.

Hopefully we'll get a spell of warmer weather soon, and we'll start to see more bat activity, as the adults move out of their hibernation sites and the move towards maternity roosts commences, ready for the breeding season around June. My bat detectors are charged up and ready...

My website: plecotus.co.uk

"Untold riches" of swarming bats...

2008-04-07T10:44:00.009+01:00

I am officially conferenced out, having spent the last three days in York for the
Mammal Society Conference. It was definitely worth going: I'm buzzing with thoughts about Irish hares, Beaver management in Bavaria, small mammal survey trials and much else besides. It's a little disappointing that there were no papers on bats, but that was more than made up for by Professor John Altringham's Cranbrook lecture.

John's team from Leeds University have carried out a large and complex study of bat swarming behaviour at caves in the Yorkshire Dales and the North Yorkshire Moors. Autumn swarming is a behaviour which is increasingly seen as an important part of the annual cycle of bats, especially Myotis and Long-eared species. Bats gather at hibernation sites, usually caves and mines, to check out the site, to help young bats find it and for courtship and mating. Swarming is typified by chasing behaviour late into the night, often peaking three or four hours after sunset and takes place during August to October.

They looked at Natterer's Bats (Myotis nattereri) and, by ringing bats at known summer maternity roosts and then harp trapping at swarming sites, were able to demonstrate that bats wer flying up to 60km to a swarming site. They were also able to demonstrate that huge numbers of bats were using these sites: up to 400 per night, with considerable turnover between nights. Furthermore, by comparing data year on year they were able to demonstrate high fidelity: bats tend to return to the same site each year. The conservation implications are huge: these sites can provide a key part of the lifecycle of very large numbers of bats, from a wide geographical area.

What struck a chord with me was the fact than John described the importance of these sites and went on to mention that it was then usual to find only a handful of hibernating bats within the caves, as many were not visible. In other words, some of the hibernation sites we survey in the Scotland could be swarming sites for similarly large numbers of bats. Not for nothing was one of John's conclusions the possibility of "untold riches" for bat-workers.

This tiny hole, high in the hills in South-west Scotland, gives access to a tunnel over half a kilometre long, which contained 9 Natterer's Bats and 1 Daubenton's. Could this be a swarming site on a similar scale to the ones in the Yorkshire Dales?

Another intriguing part of the lecture related to a study in which John's team compared the numbers of hibernating bats to the physical features of a cave or mine. They found that the size of entrance was irrelevant ("if you can get in, they will"), as was the altitude, the orientation of the entrance and the habitat nearby. What makes a good hibernaculum is large spaces inside, a reasonable depth, some cover near the entrance and not too wet. This struck a chord with me, as we've done several surveys in the past winter of a limestone mine, which seemed to have all the right features of a hibernaculum, but we never found any bats. John's conclusion was "the more water, the fewer bats", which seems to fit.

I must finish by plugging the Mammal Society's new edition of "The Mammals of the British Isles". It's not cheap (and you may need to reinforce your bookshelf to take the weight), but it is worth every penny. If you buy a copy via the Mammal Society website, all ofthe profit will go to the society.

John Altringham's Leeds University web-page: http://www.fbs.leeds.ac.uk/staff/profile.php?

The Mammal Society: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/mammal/

My website: plecotus.co.uk

The Great Hibernaculum Hunt Revisited

2008-03-25T21:07:00.011Z

A couple of times recently I've described the hibernaculum survey work I've been doing, together with several other members of Lothians Bat Group. We've been looking at potential hibernacula and sites with historical winter records of bats, in the hope of adding to our list of active hibernation sites.

The goal of all this work is to ensure that hibernacula - the most vulnerable of all bat roosts - are protected and also to to contribute as much data as possible each year to the National Bat Monitoring Programme.

(Carol Ann demonstrates how some sites are just plain awkward to access)

Having reached a stage when I've arrived at the bottom of my list of possible sites, when we're running out of winter and when frankly I've seen enough wet, muddy and claustrophobic underground places to last a lifetime, I thought it would be interesting to take stock.

Including surveys of exisiting hibernacula, both in the Lothians and in Dumfries and Galloway, in the past three months I have surveyed:

6 limestone mines
1 copper mine
7 lime kilns (one of them flooded to about half an inch higher than my waders!)
2 tunnels
4 castles
2 soutterains
1 WW2 underground bunker
2 pill-boxes
3 air-raid shelters

Out of all those sites, the following records were made:

16 Natterer's Bats (Myotis nattereri)
5 Daubenton's Bats (Myotis daubentonii)
1 Unidentified myotis bat (Myotis sp.)
6 Brown Long-eared Bats (Plecotus auritus)
16 Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus sp.)

(Two Natterer's Bats hibernating in a cave roof crevice )

The frustration is that all the bats were in the sites where we expected to find them. In other words: no, we haven't found any new hibernacula! That said, there are several sites which have strong potential and will be revisited next year. The disappointing result is probably only to be expected. Bats are extremely discerning about sites they use for hibernation: their requirements regarding temperature, humidity, constancy of both and lack of disturbance are very precise. That is exactly why it is so important to find and protect these sites.

(A Daubenton's Bat hibernating in a gap within the wall of an underground stone bothy)

So, after many days of clambering about in thick gooey mud, with chilly water running down my neck, was it all worth it? Well, yes it was. Nigel, Carol Ann, Rachel, Stuart, David, Natalie, Freda, Max, Peter and all the other bat group members I've surveyed with are great company and there's a real feeling of doing something valuable for conservation, even if it's only to strike a site off the list.

Those sites in which we didn't find any bats often produced other compensations. Amongst other things, I've seen four different Barn Owl (Tyto alba) roosts, more Roe Deer (Capreolus capreolus) than you can shake a stick at and some rather attractive grey slugs with a cream stripe (species, anyone?). Plus, loads of fascinating human history: from 3,000 year-old soutterains, through 600 year old castles to World War II bunkers and pill-boxes.

Oh, and I've got through enough Persil to sink a ship....

(Nigel, looking intrepid in a copper mine)

Please remember that hibernating bats are extremely vulnerable to disturbance. Carrying out hibernaculum surveys requires a roost visitor's licence with a specific endorsement. Entering a hibernaculum and disturbing hibernating bats is a criminal offence. Many hibernation sites are also extremely dangerous. If you are interested in doing this type of survey work contact your local bat group, who can help you to get involved legally and without risk of harming the bats or you.

Find your local bat group: http://www.bats.org.uk/batgroups/batgroups_list.asp

More information on the NBMP: http://www.bats.org.uk/nbmp/index.asp

Lothians Bat Group: http://plecotus.co.uk/page_1204624452640.html

My Website: plecotus.co.uk

Hark the Herald...Moth

2008-03-21T17:43:00.005Z

Visits to bat hibernacula sometimes produce sightings of other species, which also choose to hibernate in caves and mines. Mosquitoes and bees are occasionally found, but the ever-present companion of the hibernating bat is the Herald Moth (Scoliopteryx libatrix). I don't think I can remember every going into a hibernaculum without also finding Herald Moths: sometimes many dozens, often just one or two.

According to Butterfly Conservation, the organisation charged with conserving our diverse butterflies and moths, there are over 2,500 species of moth in the UK. So why the Herald should be the only one that seems to choose to overwinter in cavses and mines isn't clear. Many species spend the winters as eggs or as pupae, but quite a number apparently do overwinter as adults.

The Herald is a rather attractive animal, with wavy-edged wings coloured with reds and browns, which help it to blend in with dead leaves and avoid predators.

An interesting coincidence is that the Herald is a member of the Noctuidae family of night-flying moths. Something which sets them apart from other moth families is that they have developed a rudimentary hearing organ, which is used to detect the echolocation calls of approaching bats. On hearing an approaching bat the moths wings go into spasm, causing erratic flight, so that the moth is able to evade the bat.

The bats have the last laugh however, in the form of the Long-eared Bats (Plecotus spp.). which have evolved to get by with a very faint echolocation call. Their slow flying speed means that they have less need than other species for advanced warning of obstacles and their phenomenal hearing allows them to listen for prey. Their very faint call (they are known as the Whispering Bat) means that moths aren't able to hear them coming. Thus, a commonly-found sign of Brown Long-eared activity is a pile of discarded moth wings.

It is quite usual to see hibernating bats covered with droplets of condensation. What sparked off this foray into lepidoptery was the discovery today of a Herald in the same state, with huge droplets of water on it's antennae, creating the impression of some kind of miniature bog-eyed monster. Maybe this is the first sign of the moths evolving some form of revenge on the Long-eareds...

For more information on Butterfly Conservation go to http://www.butterfly-conservation.org

Another good source of information on moths: http://ukmoths.org.uk

My website: www.plecotus.co.uk

Bats, bombers and acoustic mirrors

2008-03-12T11:47:00.007Z

One reason why I first started working with bats was that bat work combines my love of wildlife with my longstanding interest in electronics. Fortunately people who do surveys with me tend to tolerate my tendency to come up with strange new ideas or pieces of equipment!

Several years ago I found myself wondering whether parabolic dishes might have a place in bat work. These are used in the recording of bird calls and other wildlife sounds and look similar to TV satellite dishes. In essence, the dish reflects sounds into a focal point, where a microphone is placed. This has two effects:

1. Sounds are concentrated by the dish, making them louder.

2. Sounds are picked up from a narrow direction, filtering out background sounds from either side.

Incidentally, not just any dish will work: a parabola is a specific curve, calculated using a mathematical formula.

I experimented with an old Sky TV dish and found that when I put a bat detector at the focal point of the dish, bat calls became louder and so could be heard from further away. However, it was clear that this would have limited practical uses, as it only worked when the dish was pointed directly at a distant bat. People recording bird calls can see a bird and point a dish at it. Bats don't allow that luxury!

More recently I became aware of something called a parabolic plane. This is sometimes used in microwave radio applications. It is like a dish, but only curved in one plane, a bit like Rolf Harris's wobble board. Between the wars gigantic parabolic planes up to 200 feet long by 26 feet high were built at strategic sites around Britain's coast. These "acoustic mirrors" were used to listen for approaching bombers: operators could hear an aircraft from 20 miles away. Unfortunately they were never used for their intended purpose: by the time World War II broke out, radar had taken over.

Image (c) English Heritage

The beauty of a parabolic plane is that it only concentrates sound from the horizontal plane, so that a bat flying in front of one at any height should be heard. It could be possible to create a kind of listening curtain: in theory any bat passing through it would be detected. To test this I made up a prototype reflector, using foam board, card and sticky-backed plastic (eat your heart out, Blue Peter) and tried it, using a low-level ultrasound source as an artificial bat.

The prototype is only 60cm by 20cm, so I wasn't expecting miracles, but tests at varying ultrasound levels showed that, using the reflector a Duet bat detector could pick up the artificial bat between 30% and 70% further away than it could on it's own. Positioning of the detector microphone is critical, as it needs to be at the precise focal point of the reflector for best results. The half-brick will need to be replaced by something with a bit more finesse!

There is some interesting potential for parabolic planes, but there are some potential draw-backs too. In theory, the bigger the reflector, the further away you can hear bats. But a bigger reflector also means the bat would be audible for a shorter time, passing through a narrower curtain. (The acoustic mirrors could hear aircraft from 20 miles away and place them to within 1.5 degrees.) Ideally a bat needs to be audible for 1-2 seconds, to be sure enough of it's call is
recorded, to allow for identification, so this may limit possible size..

Another problem is the practicality of lugging a big reflector around. Even using it in a fixed position, more than 2-3 metres in width would probably be impractical, unless as a permanent fixture. Any fixed-location survey involves predicting where the bats will fly, and they don't alway read the same books as us!

More about acoustic mirrors: http://www.ajg41.clara.co.uk/mirrors/

My website: Plecotus.co.uk

Right-diddly-wotsit squirelly

2008-03-11T15:54:00.012Z

If John Donne had been an ecologist, rather than a form of suffering for High School English students, he might have said "No bat is an island". That's an appalling piece of paraphrasing and as I write it I find myself glancing over my shoulder, in fear of an avenging teacher. However, my point is this: as bat ecologists it is very easy to become entirely focussed on "our" species and lose sight of their place within the ecosystem.

With that in mind (and because the bats are far from active at present) I present a small diversion from the world of bats, into the world of bryology: the study of mosses and liverworts. Where's the relevance? Woodland is probably the most important habitat for bats and a key part of woodland structure are the mosses and liverworts. In some British woodlands they outweigh vascular plants in terms of biomass and they form an important habitat for many invertebrates which may ultimately become bat-food. Also, I like them and it's my blog.

With over 1,100 species of bryophyte in Britain, some hard to identify, there are limits to what a casual naturalist can achieve, but to show that this is no excuse, here's my guide to five common woodland mosses everyone should be able to identify, even without a hand-lens. Just to prove my point, they were all photographed in my local (rather poor) woodland this afternoon, whilst walking the dogs.

Rhytidiadelphus squarrosus (Right-id-aye-ah-dell-fuss squaw-row-suss)

If you're a keen gardener you probably know this moss already. It's common name is Lawn Moss, for good reasons. In woods and lawns it often forms dense carpets and is very easy to identify: pull up a bit and you'll see it has a bright red stem and green leaves, which are squarrose: they emerge from the stem and bend downwards.

Thuidium tamariscinum (thoo-id-ee-um tam-ah-riss-eye-num)
My personal favourite, this plant is very easy to identify. It is regularly tripinnate, meaning that the stem is symmetrical, with each branch off the stem divided into sub-branches, which are themselves further branched. In other words, it looks like a miniature fern. The stems are always green or black (if red, you've got Hylocomium splendens) and quite springy, so the little fern-like stems often arch over, like a bramble. It's common name is Tamarisk Moss.

Dicranum scoparium (die-crane-um scop-ah-re-um)
This is an upright moss, often forming dense tufts. The giveaways are the long, thin, pointed leaves, often densely packed together and turning to one side. It's common name is Fork Moss.

Sclerapodium purum (scleh-rah-podium poo-rum)
The leaves of this moss lay along the stems and branches, tightly overlapping, giving them a bloated, fat look, with blunt tips. This feature gives it it's common name: Neat Moss. It's regularly pinnate, so the branches are roughly the same on each side of the stem and they aren't sub-branched. It should have a green stem, if it's red you may be looking at Pleurozium schreberi.

Plageothecium undulatum (play-gee-oh-thee-see-um un-dew-lah-tum)
This is a very easy moss to identify. It forms loose mats of pale green, flattened stems, usually unbranched. If you look very closely at the leaves they are undulate: in other words, wavy from end to end. Hence the common name: Wavy Flat-moss.

Having got that out of my system I can go back to talking about bats...

There is unfortunately no good field guide to mosses and liverworts currently available. However, the British Bryological Society are working to rectify that. You can view the whole of their new field guide on-line (but be aware it's a work in progress): http://hosting.sleath.co.uk/bbs/

In the meantime, Carol Crawford has published a very nice guide to common woodland mosses, and it's not expensive (£6.50): Carol L. Crawford (2002) "Bryophytes of Native Woods" (3rd ed.) Natural Resource Consultancy ISBN: 0-9543795-0-0

Many thanks to Nick Hodgetts, David Chamberlain, Alex Lockton and Sarah Whild, without whom I'd still be asking "what's that little green squishy plant?" Incidentally "Right diddly-wotsit squirrelly" was my daughter's exasperated response when I tried to teach her some bryophytes...

My website: plecotus.co.uk

The name of the bat

2008-03-06T23:22:00.004Z

I can't help thinking that the English language has failed to play fair by the bat. I mean what sort of word is "bat" to describe such a graceful, enigmatic and fascinating animal? The one distinction the word has is that it was given to a Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Bat, built in 1896. HMS Bat served in the Mediterranean and in home waters during the First World War, before being sold for scrap in 1919. The name was revived during World War II for a naval tug.

So where does this odd little word come from? It is thought to be derived from the middle english word for the bat: bakke, possibly as a result of confusion with the latin word for a night-flying insect: blatta. Bakke itself is likely to be a shortened version of the old Danish word for a bat: natbakka, or "night flapper". Sticking with our Scandinavian forebears, the old Norse had a wonderful name for them: leorblaka, which means "leather flapper". That name must come from someone who had seen a bat's wing close up. It's such an evocative name it's almost worth reviving it!

Other forebears of ours (an awful lot of old races contributed to Britain over the years) also had some interesting names for the bat. The old english word for bat is hreremus (pronounced rear-mouse), meaning "shaky mouse". Whoever came up with that name had certainly watched a foraging pipistrelle!

When the Romans came to Britain they brought the latin word for bat: vespertilio, derived from vesper, their word for "evening". From this comes the family name for all our British bats, apart from the two horseshoe bat species: vespertilionidae. It's also the original root for another bat word. In old Italian vespertilio became vipistrello and thence the modern Italian word for bat: Pipistrello, which of course led to Pipistrelle.

Other modern European languages have interesting names for bats. The Germans say fledermaus, literally "flying mouse". For an ecologist, trying to convince people to live in harmony with bats, it's a little disappointing that so many names for bats refer to mice, at risk of tainting bats with their image as vermin. I suppose it's inevitable.

The French use the word chauve-souris, which translates literally as "bald mouse" This seems odd, until we discover that it's derived from the ancient Greek calva sorix, meaning "owl mouse", which makes more sense.

For me the prize must go to the Spanish. Their name for the bat is derived from the latin mures caeculus or "blind mouse". That's bad on two fronts, as the bat is neither blind nor a mouse, but all is forgiven, because in modern Spanish the word becomes murcielago, the name given by Lamborghini to one of the fastest and most lavish supercars in the world.

That's more like it!

My website: plecotus.co.uk

The Versatile Bat Detector

2008-03-03T15:40:00.011Z

The most basic tool of the trade for a bat worker must be the heterodyne bat detector: the pocket-caculator look-alike that allows us to listen in to the sounds made by bats. Not only does it help us find bats, it often allows us to identify them to genus or species, to tell when they are feeding and to hear their social calls. It would be easy to be satisfied with that little lot, but the humble detector has other uses too.

Being pedantic, "bat detector" is the wrong name for the machine, as it implies that all you will hear on it are bats. This may stem from our tendency to talk about ultrasound as though it were something special and magical. In reality, ultrasound is simply sound above about 20kHz in frequency. The only thing that sets it apart from sounds below that frequency is the fact that one rather arrogant species with an abysmally poor hearing range can't hear it!

Many everyday things produce ultrasound: pouring water creates a loud noise around 40kHz. The standard test of whether a detector is switched on is to rub your fingers together in front of the microphone, a sound which is much louder around 45kHz than it is at frequencies within our hearing range. "Dry", rustling sounds tend to be much louder at higher frequencies: when our alsatian jumped into a huge pile of dead leaves behind me whilst I was using a detector with headphones, I though I was going to be deaf for life...

Bats aren't the only species which produce ultrasound. A common summer hedgerow sound is the high-pitched, furious squeaking of squabbling shrews. The lowest frequency of that call fall just withing our hearing range (older people may struggle to hear it at all), but on a bat detector tuned to about 20-40kHz they are very clear. In 2005 I and some colleagues from the BATML project were conducting a series of surveys along the towpath of the Union Canal. We kept hearing shrew sounds from one particular place by the water's edge. It was noticeable because these calls were extremely loud and unexpected. When you've had cause to swear loudly at something, it sticks in your mind! The Mammal Society were running their nationwide Water Shrew (Neomys fodiens) survey at the time, so I placed some tubes, baited with casters (blowfly pupae) and sure enough, the scats left in them were confirmed as having been left by a Water Shrew. This was particularly nice as it was the first record of this species from the Lothians for almost 20 years.

Another branch of natural history in which bat detectors are increasingly finding a place is in the study of Orthoptera: grasshoppers and crickets. It is possible to accurately identify them to species by listening to their sounds. Although many can be heard with the naked ear, they are clearer and louder when heard on a bat detector. Unlike bat (or shrew) calls, these sounds have no frequency variation, as they are stridulations, rather than calls, i.e. the sounds are made by rubbing legs together. Identification is made by listening to the rhythm of the sounds. As the insects tend to stay in one place whilst stridulating you can use the detector as a direction-finder to home in on them.

There's a good introduction to Orthoptera id using a bat detector on the web-site of the Environmental Records Centre for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (ERCCIS), along with a lot of other useful resources: http://www.erccis.co.uk/species/orthopteraaudio.htm

The Mammal Society's water shrew survey page: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/mammal/water_shrew_survey.shtml

The Bat Conservation Trust (BCT) website has a guide to choosing a bat detector. The models mentioned are mostly out of date now, but the technical advice is very sound: http://www.bats.org.uk/helpline/documents/Whichbatdetector.pdf

For what it's worth, I rate Bat-Box detectors as the best. They have the ideal balance of cost, effectiveness and sturdiness in the field. They're slightly cheaper if you buy direct: http://www.batbox.com/

My website: plecotus.co.uk

Time Team vs Bat Team

2008-02-27T16:02:00.009Z

My favourite TV programme is Channel 4's "Time Team", in which a team of archaeologists dig a historic site and attempt to make sense of it in just 3 days. Although the practical archaeology is interesting, for me the best part is when Stuart Ainsworth and Mick Aston take to the air and attempt to tie their site into the surrounding area. A Roman villa or iron age settlement is all very well, but when you can identify how people travelled to and from it, where they fished or went to market and why they might have chosen that particular place, it all makes so much more sense.

Surprisingly, there are strong parallels with bat work. We tend to concentrate on roosts and hibernation sites. And why not? They are the focus of the bats' activity: where you can conduct a roost census or watch bats swarming. If you have a reason (and licence) to trap and examine them, this is the best place to do it. Roosts are so much more exciting. Roost sites can be hard to find and of course they are where a population of bats may be at its' most vulnerable and in need of protection. Anyone can go for a walk with a bat detector and find a bat in flight, can't they?

Possibly they can, but with a bit of planning and focus, finding bats in flight can help to build up an understanding of how bats use the landscape, in the same way that "Time Team" try to work out how Romans or celts did.

Here's a simple example. Last year I was conducting a series of sunset surveys in some farmland, where a water pipeline was due to pass through. In two places I noted large groups of Soprano Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) feeding soon after sunset. This can be an indication that a roost may not be far away. An even better indicator is a commuting bat. Bats commuting to and from their roost at dawn and sunset tend fly fast in a straight line: they're on their way somewhere, so why waste energy flitting about, as they might when foraging? A bat flying fast, and straight at dusk, is therefore a good indication that the roost lies in the direction it's coming from. When it's followed by other bats doing the same there is a good chance it isn't far away.

The next survey was in a path running through a strip of woodland. Over twenty Sopranos passed through at sunset, all going in the same direction, the direction of one of the foraging sites I had previously noticed. Soprano Pipistrelles usually roost in buildings and the large-scale map showed a Victorian lodge half a kilometre away, right in line with where they were coming from. I dragooned some help and the next morning we were lying in wait for them near the lodge. But no bats arrived. Spreading the net a little wider, we came across about twenty bats, swarming in the corner of a field. Just to confuse us, there were no buildings close to where they were swarming )they would normally swarm in front of the roost). It turned out they were roosting in a tree, which is quite unusual for Pipistrelles in Scotland. It took another couple of visits to work out which tree the bats they were using: a mature oak.

It's always nice to find a new roost, but the icing on the cake was to also have an understanding of how they were using their habitat. I hope to find time this year to look at some of the other hedgerows and woodland edges which radiate out from the site, and try to work out what other commuting routes are used, adding to the picture of how these bats are using their landscape.

Of course, it'll take more than the three days that "Time Team" get....

The field where we found the Soprano Pipistrelles swarming at dawn. No, the oak tree in the middle isn't the roost: that would be too easy, it's to the left, out of sight.

My website: plecotus.co.uk

Hibernating Pipistrelles

2008-02-23T15:29:00.008Z

Today I spent a very pleasant couple of hours wandering through a semi-ruined castle with members of Lothians Bat group. We were there to look for hibernating bats, which occupy crevices and cracks in the decaying stonework. The most popular spot is in the deep, barrel-vaulted ceilings, which in other old buildings are often used for summer or autumn roosting.

To understand why they are so popular with bats, look at the schematic below. In a typical medieval building, arches and ceilings are built from stone blocks arranged into a curve, so that each is supported by the one outside of it. Above this, the infill is usually made of rubble. Over the years the mortar tends to fall out of the gaps between the stone blocks. As long misguided perfectionists don't repoint the stonework, this creates crevices, some of which may extend into spaces within the rubble fill, creating sometimes quite large bat havens. The downside for us is that surveying these buildings quickly causes a sore neck, from peering upwards, pointing a light into the crevices!

What is particularly interesting about the site we visited today is that, not only is it used by hibernating Brown Long-eared Bats (Plecotus auritus), two of which we saw, it is also used by Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus sp.). Remarkably little is known about the hibernating behaviour of Pipistrelle bats: they are rarely found in the mines and caves where larger British bat species are found hibernating. It is generally assumed that they hibernate individually in small crevices in trees or buildings and are probably more tolerant of fluctutations in temperature and humidity. So it was nice to find at least twelve of them here.

Unfortunately, it isn't possible to say whether they were Soprano Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) or Common Pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pipistrellus): the physical distinctions are difficult enough with a bat in the hand! However, a braver bat-worker than I might note the dark muzzles and wonder if they might be commons.

Click on the picture below to see a larger version of it and you'll see the brown splodge in the centre resolve into a Pipistrelle's face.

The following two pictures show two groups of bats, sharing crevices. I have no idea how many are hiding behind the mortar in the first picture, but the crevice in the second contained seven bats.

My website: plecotus.co.uk

Lime kilns, mines and souterrains

2008-02-22T14:40:00.016Z

During the recent spell of unseasonably pleasant weather (back to normal now - there's rain going sideways past my window) I and a bat group colleague spent an interesting afternoon in an upland area of Midlothian, looking at various man-made structures with potential to be either hibernacula or summer roosts.

Information on the sites had come from a mixture of word of mouth and references on the CANMORE archeological database (see "Armchair roost-searching"). Some CANMORE references can be little more than a name and grid reference, others include detailed archeological descriptions, which can be fascinating.

The first site was a limestone mine. This is a known hibernaculum, which has been grilled in the past, partly to protect hibernating bats from disturbance and partly to prevent adventurous youngsters from getting themselves into difficulties. I wanted to take a look, as I hadn't previously seen the site and it apparently used to have an underground link with another site, which Lothians Bat Group survey every winter for hibernating bats.

Hibernaculum grilles have quite widely-spaced, horizontal bars, to prevent human access, but make it easy for bat to fly through. It seemed some local wit had been there before us, and left his thoughts for all to see.....

The next plan was to look at several lime-kilns, which are prolific in the limestone areas of Midlothian. These are large stone-built structures, usually built into a hillside. Inside is a tall, brick-lined charging-column, into which limestone and fuel was placed. At the base are draw-holes, usually with a barrel-vaulted roof, which are used to control the air-flow, and to draw the completed lime out, ready to be mixed with water and used as fertiliser or building mortar.

Barrel-vaulting can lose it's mortar over time, creating deep crevices, perfect for hibernating bats. Also, the stonework of the kiln can decay, creating roosting opportunities. Unfortunately, none of the three kilns looked at had many crevices in the draw-holes, but all had decaying stone-work to a greater or lesser extent.

One of the kilns was a massive structure, with two charging columns and six draw-holes, all in excellent condition, making me wonder if it may have been rebuilt in the 1930s, when the government offered incentives to farmers to burn lime, due to concerns about deteriorating land fertility.

At the other end of the scale was a badly-decayed kiln within dense woodland. Landslips had partially buried it and we found a solitary bat dropping in a huge crack in the stonework. A single dropping doesn't make a roost, but it may be worth a return visit in the summer.

The third site had a lovely Barn owl (Tyto alba) roost: a deep hole, high up on the side of the kiln, with long white streaks, left by the owl's characteristic runny droppings. Inside and on the ground below were plenty of large, dark-coloured owl pellets.

There was no sign of the owl (or owls), though it could have been deep inside it's roost-hole, out of sight. Not a bat roost, but it was very nice to see signs of this scarce bird, all the same.

Having seen enough lime kilns to last a while, the last site of the day was a soutterain. These are iron age (about 700BC-500AD) structures, believed to be underground storage facilities. In an age before refridgeration, building a shallow, stone-lined tunnel was a good way to keep food dry and cool, to last through the winter months.

This particular soutterain lies in a small, fenced-off area in the centre of a field. Accessed via a low roofed doorway (and when I say low, I'm talking about crawling on hands and knees), and short entrance tunnel, it is almost 16 metres long and up to 2m wide and high. The walls are made of unmortared stone, full of very deep crevices.

No hibernating bats were visible, but there could have been legions of them, out of sight! With a low, stable temperature and high humidity (yes, it's mud you have to crawl through...), the conditions are ideal for a hibernaculum, especially as it is in area full of excellent bat habitat.

The soutterain is out of sight of the nearest road and probably not known to many people, so is unlikely to suffer much disturbance, especially in winter. That said, a team of Powergen workers, dangling from nearby power lines looked fascinated by what we were up to.

More information about barn owls:

barnowltrust.org.uk

My website: http://plecotus.co.uk/

Confessions of a bat surveyor

2008-02-17T23:10:00.009Z

I sometimes find working with bats a little humbling. Not only is there a vast amount we don't understand about the bats here in the UK, let alone worldwide; there are many big bear-traps, waiting to catch the unwary bat surveyor. I thought I knew most of the worst ones, but today I discovered I had fallen into a trap I actually knew about, a really obvious one. Oh bum!

I think Brown Long-eared Bats (Plecotus auritus) must be my favourite bat species (hence my choice of web address). They are very attractive (by bat standards), with enormous rabbit-ears, dwarfing their bodies and a face that makes them look faintly bemused by life. Better still, they occupy a very specialised and fascinating niche: emerging late, flying slow and using their ears to listen for their prey. Not called the "whispering bat" for nothing, their echolocation is very faint, allowing them to catch those moth species which have developed rudimentary ears to help them take avoiding action when an echolocating bat is near. In short, they are nothing short of amazing.

Brown Long-eareds are generally easy to identify in Scotland: nothing else has ears anything like that size. In the South of England, things are harder as there is another long-eared bat: the Grey Long-eared Bat (Plecotus austriacus), which is extremely difficult to separate from it's brown cousin. Bat-workers there have to resort to measuring tiny parts of the bat's body to separate the two. Unfortunately, I don't have that excuse!

The trap I fell into was to identify a Brown Long-eared Bat as a Daubenton's Bat (Myotis daubentonii). How is this possible? The Daubie has tiny ears by comparison! Long-eared bats have an endearing habit of folding their ears under their wings when they go into torpor, to help them retain warmth. This leaves the tragus (the spear-like middle-part of the ear) sticking up, looking for all the world like a small ear...

In my defence, I must say that I wasn't alone, there were several (nameless) people with me on a hibernaculum survey last month, and they share in my crime! I even took a photograph of the bat in question, which, when enlarged, clearly shows the roots of the ears folded over the flanks, but it was a bit fuzzy, so I didn't look closely at it until this evening. Today we did a second survey of the hibernaculum (the National Bat Monitoring Programme requires two winter surveys, a month apart). We found a bat in a similar place, in the same attitude, yet seeming to be a different species. It seemed too much of a coincidence, so on arriving home, I checked the photographs. It's a fundamental error, but I suppose we were peering in torchlight at a bat on the roof of a mine...

Anyway, in the spirit of public humilition and restitition I hereby present my guide to not making the same mistake! The three pictures below tell the story.

Firstly, the Brown Long-eared in question. Note the wing roots folded over the flanks, the shape of the tragi (masquerading as ears) and their pale colour. If the picture looks a bit odd, it's because the camera is pointing up and zooming into a bat hanging from the roof of the mine.

Next, a Daubenton's Bat for comparison.

Finally, it's close relative and another species commonly found in our hibernacula: the Natterer's Bat (Myotis nattereri)

Now go forth and learn from my error! Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Please remember that handling bats, disturbing them or their roosts, photographing them or surveying their hibernacula, all requires a licence. If you're interested in getting involved, join your local bat group. See here for a list of contacts: http://www.bats.org.uk/batgroups/batgroups_list.asp

For information on the National Bat Monitoring Programme (NBMP) see: http://www.bats.org.uk/nbmp

My website: http://plecotus.co.uk/

The kitchen table harp trap

2008-02-16T17:17:00.012Z

For some time I'e been thinking about building a harp trap for my own use and I'm delighted to say that this winter I have finally found the time to do so. What is a harp trap? Also called a Tuttle trap (after Merlin Tuttle, whose invention it is), it's an ingenious trap which catches bats in flight, without harming them.

It works like this: a bat flies towards the trap and recognises a harp-like collection of vertical nylon lines about 2.5cm apart. With great agility it successfully flies between the lines, but what it doesn't expect is a second set of lines offset from the first, so that it can't avoid hitting them. It then slides unharmed down the lines, into a canvas bag below. The bat will try to climb the side of the bag, so it can take off again, but the sides of the bag are lined with thick, slippery polythene. The bat can climb the canvas, but soon reaches the seam where it is joined to the polythene and can go no further until it's removed.

Harp traps can be marvellously effective, when used properly. They are particularly good at trapping bats leaving roosts, as the bats have less time to see and avoid the trap than they would if they were free flying. More importantly, the bats are entirely unharmed and in my view suffer less stress than if caught in a mist-net. The problem is the cost: a single harp trap costs upwards of £800. See http://www.faunatech.com.au/products/harptrap.html for pictures of a commercial trap made by Austbat.

I reckoned that I could reduce that cost to under£200 by building my own trap, and add a few ideas of my own. Firstly, I wanted a smaller trap. With a catching area 1.8m wide and 2.4m high, the Austbat trap is unwieldy in some circumstances. It is also difficult to erect, as it is necessary to unroll and stretch the lines every time the trap is used. This process is fraught with difficulty at the best of times, let alone in darkness and pouring rain, when you're tired and fed up at 2am! My thinking was that a smaller catching area could allow for the harp section to be permanently erected within a frame. When not in use, the frame could be bagged , with the legs and catching bag removable for transport. A smaller trap would also be lighter and could be lifted on a couple of poles to cover the entrance to a high tree roost or the eaves of a roof. You can do that with an Austbat trap, but you need ropes and a team of stout people singing sea shanties, to haul it up!

And here it is...

The catching section is slightly over 1m square, with the frame, legs etc, made from lightweight square-section aluminium, which also has the advantage of being an easy material to work. The legs are easy to remove, without affecting the rest of the structure, so that the frame can be slung between two poles and lifted up to a roost entrance.

I took the opportunity to address two weaknesses I've noticed with the Austbat and similar traps. They have the nylon monofilament tied around the frame top and bottom. This has the effect of making the nylon vulnerable to scraping against rough surfaces and fraying or breaking. I tried to address this by tying the nylon lines to tiny hooks screwed into the frame, so that the frame itself protects the nyon.

The Austbat traps are also vulnerable to escapes at each end of the bag, as the plastic material is only attached to the two long sides. I have made a point of attaching plastic to the two short sides, in the hope of preventing that. The base of the harp frame sits slightly inside the bag, to allow this to be possible.

The hardest part of building the trap was sewing the canvas and plastic. Dressmaking isn't a skill of mine anyway, and it takes a lot of effort to push a sailmakers needle through several layers of the thick canvas. My fingers may never be the same again!

Where does the kitchen table come in? That's where I built it (it's too damn cold in the garage at this time of year!) The table still bears the scars.

Of course, I'm rather proud of the trap, but success isn't realy measured by appearance, or sound engineering or even my pride - it's measured by whether it actually works: will it catch bats?

Watch this space...

Please note that the use of a harp trap to catch bats in the UK is heavily restricted. I am able to use one because I have a roost visitor's licence, endorsed for the use of a harp trap, I am also licenced to catch a number of bats for a specific scientific study. Trapping bats without he necessary skills and licence is illegal and likely to be harmful to the bats. If you're interested in getting involved in this kind of work, the best starting point is to join your local bat group.

My website: http://plecotus.co.uk/

Armchair roost-searching

2008-02-14T22:54:00.011Z

The holy grail of bat-work is finding roosts. Finding and watching feeding or commuting bats is great but the roost sites are the centre of the network of bat activity. More importantly, if we know where roosts are, we can ensure they are safe from disturbance or destruction.

So how do we find new roost sites? Basically, it involves one of three methods, though all three require a great deal of luck!

Method 1 is to seek out commuting bats and attempt to let them lead you to the roost. Great fun, and sometimes very successful, although hard work.

Method 2 is to simply stumble across one. Bat calls from worried householders can bring new roosts to light. Many bat-workers have had someone say casually "Bats? Oh there are hundreds of them in our attic - you should come and see them." A remarkable number of people have bats in their homes, are perfectly happy and don't make any fuss about it.

Method 3 is to carry out a dawn survey: bats tend to swarm around the entrance to their roost for 20-30 minutes just before dawn, so looking for them can be quite effective.

Whichever approach (or approaches) is used, some homework helps provide the best return for time and effort, and this is the ideal time of year to do it. We're lucky to live in an internet age and the web is stuffed with handy resources.

The NBN (National Biodiversity Network) Gateway houses a lot of records of roosting bats in Scotland, though it seems patchier south of the border. Go to http://www.searchnbn.net/, type a species name into the search box and then select the interactive distribution map. This is a handy (though slow) gadget which allows you to navigate your way around the records held. Unless you make special arrangements with data providers, you can only view the records at an accuracy of 100m, but that's a starting point for a roost search. Don't assume a record means that a site is known about. I recently found six local records of Brown Long-eared Bat roosts, which weren't know about in our local bat group. Remember also that an absence of records may mean a shortage of bat-workers, rather than a shortage of bats!

Maps are, of course essential for this sort of work. The Ordnance Survey have made their mapping available on-line, as an interactive tool. In my view nothing can ever replace a dog-eared 1:25 000 scale map, complete with coffee-stains and ten years-worth of pencil marks and scribbles, but I have to admit that the Get-a-map service is extremely convenient! http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/getamap/

Some bat roosts are found in historical man-made structures: old buildings, bridges, mines, lime kilns etc. The Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments Scotland (quite a mouthful!) have an on-line database of archaeological site records called CANMORE, which can be searched either manually or via an interactive map. This is similar to the NBN Gateway, but faster. It's a terrific resource, which I've been using recently to search for potential hibernaculum sites, such as world war 2 pill-boxes, disused mineworkings etc. Go to http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/search.html and try a CANMORE search. Even if you don't find a potential roost, you'll be amazed what archeologists have found near where you live!

Once we have a site which may be of interest, what can be done next? Taking a close-up look from the air may help. Windows Live Search offers an interactive satellite photograph service, similar to the well-known Google Earth, but with significantly better coverage. Go to http://maps.live.com/ and try zooming in to the site of interest. If your site is in a high definition area, not only can you zoom in close and see what it looks like, you can also get a sense of the surroundings habitats, flyways, foraging potential and so on. It's also a damn good toy just to play with! (I know the photographs of York were taken on a Tuesday because my Mum has her washing on the line!)

Knowing my luck, summer will come along and I'll be too busy to follow up these sites, but at least I will have had a winter bat "fix" and being familiar with these resources often comes in handy with all sorts of fieldwork planning.

My website http://plecotus.co.uk/

I want to live in Poland!

2008-02-12T23:48:00.000Z

I had the privilege today of hearing a fascinating presentation by John Haddow of Central Scotland Bat Group about the Nietoperek Bat Reserve in Poland.

Nietoperek is something of a legend in the bat world: a massive underground system of world war 2 fortifications: with 32 kilometres of tunnels, an amazing thing in itself. But what really adds the thrill is the fact that they are used as a hibernation site by mind-boggling numbers of bats.

For several years John has been taking part in the annual census of hibernating bats, when a large group of skilled bat-workers from across Europe come together to count the bats in the tunnel system. The numbers are incredible: over 30,000 bats were present this year. The predominant species are Greater Mouse-eared Bats (Myotis myotis), with many other species represented, including Daubenton's Bat (Myotis daubentonii), Natterer's Bat (Myotis nattereri), Brown Long-eared Bats (Plecotus auritus) and Barbastelles (Barbastella barbastellus).

Why do they gather in such huge numbers and (more importantly for us!) why don't they do so over here? The numbers of bats we see in Scottish hibernacula are tiny by comparison! According to Frank Greenaway, it's all a matter of our Atlantic climate versus the continental climate of Poland. Put simply, it gets a lot colder in winter in Poland and stays that way for longer, so bats have a greater imperative to find an underground site with a stable temperature.

I also came across a wonderful new word: Chiropterology: The visitor centre near Nietoperek is called The Chiropterological Information Centre. I now know what to say when people who know nothing of ecology ask what I do for a living: I'm a chiropterologist!

The Chiropterological Information Centre: http://www.mos.gov.pl/strona/pl/cicinfouk.htm

Frank Greenaway's video on bat torpor: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/mammals/webcast-torporinbatsvid/no-mamm-torporinbatsvid.html

This site describes a visit to Nietoperek: http://www.iol.ie/~corkbatgroup/Nietoperek.htm

My website: http://plecotus.co.uk

Life in a hostile habitat: the wing of a bat

2008-02-10T18:53:00.000Z

For several years I have been taking a close interest in bat parasites. Indeed, as I write this, to the side of my laptop are a stack of specimen storage vials containing over 400 parasite specimens, taken from over 80 individual bats.

Many of my bat-worker colleagues find this interest hard to understand. Admittedly, they do not fall into the charismatic megafauna "cute and cuddly" bracket, but many are impressive animals in their own right.

Spinturnicidae are the largest and most obvious of the mite families, which use bats as their hosts. Superficially like miniature claw-less crabs, they live out their entire lives on the wing and tail membranes of their host, never leaving the bat, except to pass to a new host. Unlike many ectoparasites, they do not take refuge in the bat’s fur.

The wing membrane is a mind-bogglingly hostile habitat: in flight the wings flap 10-15 times per second, requiring immense grip and an aerodynamic profile to stay attached. Like all mammals, bats regularly groom themselves, and unable to hide in the bat's fur, these mites need to make it difficult for the bat to dislodge them from the wing. Vulnerable eggs or larvae would not survive long.

To survive in this difficult habitat Spinturnix mites have several adaptations:

Their short, stout legs are extremely strong.

Feet are equipped with large claws and sticky-hooked pads, to cling on.

The body is flattened and armoured with chitinous plates.

Egg & larval stages are completed within the female's body.

The female gives birth to a single protonymph,

Removing Spinturnix specimens from the bats is an uphill struggle. As soon as the mite realises it is threatened it either runs across the wing membrane (and they're fast), or it hunkers down and grips the membrane tightly. Either way, the best way to remove them without risk of harming the bat is to dab it with a drop of ethyl acetate or 70% alchohol, which usually dampens it's ardour.

Having gone through the difficult processes of catching a bat, then removing the mite, the fun is only beginning! Attempting to identify of bat mites has led me to seek documents published by the Zoological Society of London in 1923, by the University of California in 1960, and most recently a Russian-language parasitology journal! But it's all good, clean fun....

Pictures:

Top - Daubenton's Bat Myotis daubentonii, showing the wing membrane.

Middle - Close up of the wing membrane, with a Spinturnix myoti mite.

Bottom - Adult female Spinturnix myoti.

Anyone wanting to study bat parasites in the UK is lucky to be able to draw on the work of Anne Baker of the Natural History Museum. With Jenny Craven of Leeds University she produced a checklist of species in 2003, which is available on the web: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/acarology/saas/saasp/2003/saasp14.pdf

Please note, trapping, handling or otherwise disturbing bats in the UK is illegal without a licence from one of the statutory nature conservation organisations (SNH, CCW, Natural England).

My website: plecotus.co.uk

Two roosts for the price of one

2008-02-06T20:11:00.001Z

Many commercial building surveys for bats result in a big fat nothing (often they are requested simply to confirm the absence of bat roosts prior to demolition or renovation), so it was nice recently to find one building with two separate roosts.

Obviously, I can't say on here where the site is, but with great riparain and woodland habitats at hand, plus several large attic spaces, it was a promising site. The first attic space I entered revealed many accumulations of bat droppings, mostly running in a line below the ridge. This was because the bats had been roosting in the space between the fibreboard lining and the roof tiles. Droppings had fallen into the attic through gaps in the fibreboard and these gaps were particularly prevalent at the ridge. Given the small size of the droppings, the large quantitiesof them and the fact that the bats clearly have an affinity for crevices, makes it likely that they are one of the Pipistrelle species, but I can't be certain of that until they return to the roost later in the year. (An advantage of being in Scotland, with a limited range of bat species: I would be far less willing to make even tentative suggestions as to species if I were in the south-east, where there are more than twice as many species!)

Incidentally, you can tell bat droppings from mouse droppings because, although they are a similar tiny size and cylindrical shape, bat droppings tend to be much darker and have a "knobbly" texture because they are largely made up of pieces of hard chitin from insect ectoskeletons. If you rub a bat dropping between your fingers it will usually turn into a gritty dust, whereas the mouse dropping will probably squash between your fingers (yum!). In the pictures you can see how some of the older droppings are turning grey.

The second roost was in a separate attic space. The droppings there, instead of being concentrated in piles, were scattered everywhere. They were also a little larger than the others and had a slightly shiny appearance. It's possible these were left by Brown Long-eared Bats (Plecotus auritus), which tend to roost in the apex of an open attic space and fly around to warm up before emerging from the roost. Later I analysed some of these droppings under the microscope and the shiny appearance was caused by large quantities of moth scales. (Excuse the picture quality below - photomicroscopy isn't my strong point!) Moths form a significant part of BLE food, especially in Scotland, but again, I won't know what species they are for certain until they return later in the year.

If you fancy trying bat dropping analysis (it really isn't as horrid as it sounds) try to get hold of a copy of "Identification of Arthropod Fragments in Bat Droppings" by Caroline Shiel et al, published in 1997 by the Mammal Society. (Try Pennine Books http://www.penninebooks.co.uk/)

My website: http://plecotus.co.uk/

What's in a bat box?

2008-02-05T23:05:00.000Z

Well, hopefully...bats.

When the first bat-box schemes were launched, in the 1970s, using sponsorship from viewers of BBC TV's "Nationwide" programme, there was one design: the standard wooden bat-box. They're not unlike a blue-tit nest-box, but instead of a hole on the front, the bats access by climbing a roughened board and entering through a narrow slit at the base. Easy and cheap to make from a single plank of rough timber, there must be many thousands of them around the country and they're as effective as ever.

Bat boxes do a great job of supporting bat conservation by raising awareness, providing an easy way of monitoring local bat populations, and by providing bats with roosting opportunities in places where alternatives are limited. Annual bat box occupancy checks carried out by local Bat Groups also give a great opportunity for novice bat-workers to see bats close up (strictly supervised by someone with an appropriate licence).

Today, many designs are available, to the extent that choosing bat-boxes is almost as hard as choosing a new car! Do we want it to emulate narrow crevices, to suit Pipistrelles, or bigger tree-holes, to suit Noctules? Do we want cheap and cheerful wooden construction, or shall we push out the boat and use deluxe woodcrete bat-boxes? How about a wedge shape? Should the door be on the top or at the front? Should it be painted black? And so on...

Here in the Lothians, a bat box containing anything other than Pipistrelles is sadly a rarity, though a box full of Pips is still a welcome sight. Whilst the traditional boxes are well-used, they seem to prefer slimmer, more crevice-like designs. However, the most popular design seems to be the dome-shaped woodcrete (a cement and sawdust mix) boxes, made by Schwegler. They're not cheap, but the occupancy rates are definitely higher.

Anyone thinking of putting up bat boxes would be well-advised to take advice from their local Bat Group. A little experience and foresight in choosing the right boxes and positioning them correctly will make a big difference to their success...or otherwise.

Advice from the Bat Conservation Trust: http://www.bats.org.uk/helpline/documents/Batboxes-yourquestionsanswered.pdf

My website: http://plecotus.co.uk/

The great hibernaculum search

2008-02-05T19:33:00.001Z

Ever since we had to cease surveying one of our bat hibernaculum sites because of dangerous subsidence, Lothians Bat group members have been keeping an eye out for other hibernation sites to survey, to add to our two remaining ones.

We have revisited an old limestone mine, last surveyed in the late 1980's, with some success. The January survey there revealed one Natterer's, three Daubenton's, plus an unidentifiable bat's bum poking out of a crevice close to the entrance. It doesn't sound like much, but five bats is a fair result for almost three hours spent underground! (The bat pictured here is a Daubenton's Bat Myotis daubentonii)

Here in Scotland, most hibernating bats are found in old mines or caves, and they tend to be tucked into crevices and holes. For this reason, surveying for them is a slow and laborious business and it's likely that we only see a tiny proportion of the bats present. Nonetheless, it's important work, as we can compare results year-on-year and our findings are fed into the National Bat Monitoring Programme (NBMP).

I have never made any bones about the lack of joy that hibernaculum surveys bring me! The sites we currently visit are fairly civilised, with high roofs and not too much water or clay to wade through, but that's just the luck of the draw! Lulled into a false sense of security I recently agreed to take a small group of intrepid (more so than me) bat-workers to search for a couple of almost-forgotten mines, to see if they could be added to the Bat Group's survey programme.

The first site looked ok at first, though a low roof meant stooping (being 6 feet tall doesn't help!) Most of the floor was covered with about 12 inches of water and one by one we each experienced the joy of rapidly and unexpectedly descending twelve inches as the fine limestone silt undert he water acted like quicksand. Deciding that discretion was a good idea, we retreated and were lucky to leave the site with the same number of wellies we entered with!

The second site was even more entertaining, as recent heavy rain and a build-up of rubbish at the entrance meant that the water was within eighteen inches of the roof. I wasn't too keen on the colour of the water, either.

If you're interested in hibernaculum visits please ensure you work with your local bat group. Not only is it potentially dangerous to do this without appropriate equipment and experience, it requires a bat roost visitor's licence with a specific endorsement. Accidentally disturbing bats during hibernation is very easily done and can have a devastating effect on the bats.

National bat Monitoring Programme: http://www.bats.org.uk/nbmp/index.asp

My website: http://plecotus.co.uk/