Two steps up for bat monitoring?

I've written before about my hope that the rescue and revitalisation of Titley Electronics (makers of Anabat) would result in a shake-up of the market for unattended monitoring equipment. With Titley and Wildlife Acoustics (makers of the Songmeter) battling for the marketplace the winners will be those of us who use their equipment. With remarkable symmetry both companies have looked at their existing offer, listened to customer feedback and both are launching ground-breaking new machines. Interestingly they are also swapping places in the cost stakes.

Wildlife Acoustics appear to have addressed a lot of the issues with their SM2BAT with their new SM3BAT. With a die-cast aluminium case it will be more robust than the previous machine. They have also addressed problems with cumbersome access and risk of letting water inside the unit. The control and screen are now on the outside of the case, making them more accessible and the batteries now slide into slots in the side of the machine. 

The new Songmeter SM3BAT from Wildlife Acoustics

(Photo copyright Wildlife Acoustics)

The Wildlife Acoustics approach of recording in ZCA (Analook) format as well as in compressed WAV (audio) format is strengthened by a massive increase in memory to a Terrabyte, allowing those large files plenty of room for a change. Another problem with the old SM2BAT was the vulnerability of the microphones and W.A. have a new and more robust microphone for the SM3BAT. They also claim an improvement in power consumption and there is no longer a need for an adaptor to use an external battery.

It all sounds very promising. The downside is that they have abandoned the £1000 including VAT price point to pay for the improvements and I understand the SM3BAT will market at £1500. The new microphones are also double the cost of the old ones at £200 each. A big increase, but maybe worth it?

Titley are countering by moving downmarket with their new Anabat Express. At just £500 each you could buy three of these machines for one SM3BAT (though the SM3BAT can record from two microphones concurrently, if required). 

The new Anabat Express

(Photo copyright Titley Electronics)

Compared with the older SD1 and SD2 Anabats the Express is very different and, like W.A. Titley have listened carefully to customer feedback. A key reason why people started buying SM2BATs in preference to Anabats was the the Anabat's lack of integral weatherproofing. The Express is built into a stout weatherproof case, screen-printed with camouflage. The case is little bigger than the original Anabat machines, making it rather smaller and neater than the SM3BAT. The older chunky Anabat microphones have given way to a new and smaller mic. Happily Titley have finally given up on CF memory cards, moving to the ubiquitous and smaller SD card (in fairness they had already done this with the Roostlogger).

Titley also claim a significant improvement on power consumption and the Express uses 4 AA batteries. Oddly in the SM3BAT W.A. have chosen to carry on using 4 large and heavy D cells.

This interior view of the Anabat Express, with AA batteries in place shows how small this low-cost machine is. 

(Photo copyright Titley Electronics)

The Express also has built in GPS for the first time. It's not really a hand-held unit, so the purpose of the GPS receiver is to allow the machine to calculate sunset and dawn times, making it possible to programme the machine to start and stop recording at times relative to these, rather than fixed times. This was always a strength of the SM2BAT, compared to the older Anabats, which require regular reprogramming through the season.

It's great to see both companies listening and innovating and it will be interesting to see what these two new machines are like in practice. W.A. have a habit of making equipment complex to use in the field, which is fine if you're a bit of a techno-geek, but more of a problem if you're just an average bat worker. Titley's previous machines have always been relatively user-friendly, though the manuals for their previous models have been unintelligible! Whether all these innovations deliver the goods remains to be seen. Happily both manufacturers have been kind enough to offer me machines to try out.

On paper it looks like W.A. are aiming for the gold standard with the SM3BAT, though it's costly and more visible, therefore potentially vulnerable when left in the field. The Anabat Express, with its low price-point could be bought in quantity and its small size and camouflaged appearance makes it potentially less vulnerable. If both machines live up to their promise it could be a case of "horses for courses". For long-term placement on a wind farm Met mast the SM3BAT could be ideal. For large scale deployment over a site the Anabat Express could fit the bill. Time will tell...

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"I know there aren't any bats..."

In my work I meet many bat roost owners, varying in attitude towards "their" bats from delighted to appalled and all points in between. I also encounter many people who are commissioning a bat survey because they have been obliged to do so. Often in the UK this occurs when someone applies to their local authority for planning consent to carry out work on a building. The law requires the local authority to consider protected species, so if there is any possibility for a bat roost to be present a bat survey must be carried out. "I know there aren't any bats there, but we have to have a survey" is often the client's opening gambit. It's not an unreasonable attitude: what little most people know about bats leads them to expect them to be highly visible, extremely rare and likely to roost in caves or gothic castles. Against that background it seems insane for a local authority to request a bat survey of a three bedroom suburban house, a 1970's primary school or a city centre council flat. Yet I and my colleagues frequently come across bat roosts in buildings like these.

This modern primary school is home to 280 Soprano Pipistrelles. They roost alongside the main entrance and most people think the noise is made by nesting birds.

Part of the problem is one of perception - bats are rare, that's why they're protected. Yet some bat species are very common. Here in central Scotland Soprano and Common Pipistrelles and Daubenton's Bats are all common, but have the same level of protection as rarities such as Whiskered Bats or Nathusius' Pipistrelles. Rarity isn't the sole reason for protection - vulnerability is a key issue. Our commonest species (in central Scotland), the Soprano Pipistrelle gather in their hundreds and even thousands to breed. The destruction of one of these roosts could harm the species over a large area. Bats reproduce very slowly - a single female will often only have one offspring in a good year and the need to gain weight swiftly in order to survive hibernation means that many do not survive. Thus bats are usually slow to recover from set-backs. Reducing prey availability caused by pesticides, illegal roost destruction through prejudice and stupidity and a host of other factors all combine to make legal protection essential.

Another factor in the misconception is the expectation that bats are visible in their roosts. We have Hollywood to thank for that. People expect to glance inside an attic and see a host of bats hanging from the ceiling, with their wings wrapped around their bodies. In the case of Horseshoe Bats that genuinely is the case, though bats tend to be a great deal smaller than they appear to be when in flight. Most other bat species in the UK roost in holes or crevices of one type or another, meaning that when they roost in buildings they are less likely to be visible to the uninitiated. Not long ago I surveyed a farm, the owner of which insisted there were no bats around his farm. Not only were there three species of bats roosting in his farm, there was a colony of about 80 Common Pipistrelles roosting alongside his bedroom window.

This colony of Brown Long-eared Bats are tucked into a crevice between two roof beams. If disturbed they tend to move deeper into the crevice, out of sight.

I'm not sure where the popular conception that bats only roost in old buildings comes from. It's certainly true that large country mansions and castles usually do contain bat roosts, but this often has as much to do with the presence of undisturbed spaces and the maturity of surrounding habitat as anything else. Modern house builders are surprisingly good at including loose-fitting fascia boards, poorly attached flashing and many other features which bats find to their liking and it is usually in modern buildings that people are particularly surprised to find bats.

Not a building which fits with the popular vision of a building used by roosting bats, but 800 Soprano Pipistrelles roost under the slates of this house every summer.

I have no doubt that there are many buildings around the country containing bat roosts that the owners are unaware of. Either they don't notice the signs or don't recognise them for what they are. Two years ago I spent a couple of weeks flying (when I'm not working with bats I fly gliders) from an airfield in Leicestershire. The club house there is a single-storey, L-shaped building about five years old. In the shelter of the L-shape are comfy tables and chairs, accessible from the bar. It's a nice place to sit on a summer evening and is well-used by club members. I had only been there a couple of days when I realised that a colony of Common Pipistrelles were roosting  at the wall-head alongside these tables. Each evening as the sun started to go down around ten bats would emerge and fly through the group of people who were sitting drinking and chatting. Nobody ever noticed them! I suspect people occasionally glimpsed a bat and assumed it was a songbird. The club management were entirely unaware of the presence of a bat roost in their recently-build clubhouse. If they applied for planning permission to change it and were asked for a bat survey I expect they would be astonished and annoyed at being asked to commission a bat survey...

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10 Pet hates of an ecological consultant

I'm a fairly laid back person and I learned long ago that its not worth getting wound up about things. But in my work as a Consultant Ecologist and bat specialist there are certain irritants that crop up time and again. I thought it might be fun to create a top ten, so here it is.

10 - People who think all bats are the same. We have 18 species of bat in the UK and at least nine here in Scotland. Each occupies a distinct niche, with behaviour, habitat, roosting habits etc entirely different from the rest. Why then do people (including some of the poorer consultant ecologists) insist on talking about bats as though they were one unvarying species?

9 - Jokes about "bat man". I like a joke as much as the next person. But I mean, really? Bat man? Satirical wit of the highest calibre it ain't! And guess what? I've heard it before! Just once or thrice.

8 - Rigid adherence to the BCT Bat Survey Guidelines. The word "guideline" gives it away. This document is an excellent starting point in planning a bat survey, but to rigidly adhere to its content, without consideration or understanding is just plain silly. You should be able to explain why you're deviating from the guidelines, but an ecologist who lacks the knowledge and experience to do so also lacks sufficient knowledge and experience to be carrying out bat surveys in the first place. Enough said!

7 - Sub-standard equipment used in bat surveys. It's simple: a good quality broadband bat detector and a means of recording calls during a survey for later confirmation of species if necessary. Yet often commercial bat surveys are done with heterodyne bat detectors, often cheap and nasty ones too. One large Scottish consultancy regularly sends out bat survey teams with only enough bat detectors for half of them to be equipped at all. And that verges on criminal negligence.

6 - Clients who ask for bat surveys at the end of September. Here in Scotland the bat survey season ends at the end of September. We told you that months ago. We wrote it in a report for you. We reminded you in an email. We even explained why. Next time should we tattoo it on your forehead? Would that help?

5 - Attention-seekers who pretend to be scared of bats. A tiny number of people have a genuine phobia about bats. Often they are also phobic about birds. It's hard for them and I'm sympathetic. But I have no time for the much greater number of people who pretend to be phobic because they want to be the centre of attention. I've seen genuine hysteria and it's very different.

4 - Clients who pretend they don't know about a bat roost in the hope we won't notice it. Really? You have 500 Soprano Pipistrelles in your roof and you seriously hoped I wouldn't notice? Not only is it very silly but if you need our professional assistance we need to work together and that involves trust. So stop playing silly buggers...

3 - People calling me a bat expert. The more I work with bats the more I realise how much there is we still don't know about   these amazing and enigmatic creatures. Yes I know some stuff, but I can't echolocate, I can't turn in high speed flight a whisker away from a wall and I can't  slow my heartbeat to once a minute. If you want a real bat expert ask a bat. 

2 - Garden centre bat boxes. There are many designs of bat box around. Some are more successful than others. Some work better for this species or that one or in certain types of location. What is never going to work is the type which is on sale in garden centres and pet shops with a horizontal plywood perch at the base, at a right angle to the entrance slot. The bats need to emerge from the entrance and dive to rapidly gain airspeed. If they do so with one of those bat boxes they'll get a sudden headache! Which is why they are a waste of money.

1 - Overly complicated bat detectors. I'm male, therefore I like gadgets. Big shiny gadgets with lots of buttons and knobs make my eyes go wide with excitement. Some bat detector manufacturers have seen me coming and are making ever more clever and complex machines so I can spend my pennies on shiny toys. But bat detectors aren't like other gadgets. We use them in the dark. At night. When we're cold. And tired. And fed up by the lack of bat activity. And when we keep tripping over things. And we're trying to juggle a detector, a recorder, a torch and a notebook and pen. By all means make them clever and fill them with whistles and bangs. But for heavens sake make them so I can work them in the field without needing a masters in geekiness and a 100 page manual!

So there's my annual rant. Now I can return to being calm, collected and relaxed about my work.

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A bright new future for Anabat?

The announcement last autumn that Titley Electronics, manufacturer of Anabat had gone out of business was something of a blow. I have never had much good to say about Titley themselves - their abysmal customer service was only latterly mitigated by a helpful UK office. But the Anabat is an excellent bat survey tool and one that would be missed. Furthermore, it was a design that had a great deal of potential for future development (though Titley's developments of it tended more towards gimmick than improvement).

The reaction to Titley's demise was swift. Their only real competitor, Wildlife Acoustics appeared to step up their marketing and Anabats started appearing on eBay for surprisingly low prices. At the end of October came the welcome news that the ashes of Titley had been bought by Elexon, an electonics company specialising in mining equipment.



Since then things have been quiet, presumably whilst the new organisation settles in. Before Christmas I had an interesting conversation with Andrew Dobson, the new UK agent for Titley. Whilst it is too early to make judgements, Andrew is upbeat about Anabat and indicated that Elexon might be keen to fund further development of Anabat.

For those in the Uk with an interest in Anabat, Andrew is hosting an open day at the new Titley Scientific UK office in Coppull, Lancashire on Tuesday 26 February. Chris Corben, the designer of Anabat and Kim Livengood will be flying in from the US and will be delivering free training sessions on a variety of Anabat-related subjects. Having attended Chris and Kim's Anabat seminars in the past I can confirm they are always interesting.

The open day is from 9am to 5pm at the Titley office at Coppull Enterprise Centre, Mill Lane, Coppull, Lancashire PR7 5BW. If you are planning to attend and would like to suggest a subject for Chris to cover email Andrew Dobson: andrew.dobson@titley-scientific.com

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The return of "one-ear"

Each winter I regularly don my hard hat, waterproofs, torches etc and deliberately choose to descend into dark, wet, muddy and essentially unpleasant places. Hardly the act of a sane adult, but then nobody's ever accused me of being one of them! Surveying underground bat hibernacula (places used by hibernating bats) provides survey data for the National Bat Monitoring Programme (NBMP), creating useful information about bat population change. I am also undertaking a long-term study of how bats vary their use of underground sites through the hibernation period.

One site I visit regularly is a tunnel in the Dumfries and Galloway hills (See "A Most Peculiar Hibernaculum", 28 February 2009). Built several hundred years ago to channel a water supply for a small village, one end is now blocked and the open entrance is less than one square metre. Inside the tunnel opens up to a sufficient height to walk upright and continues through the solid rock for 350 metres (not quite the 500m I said in 2009, but I've measured it now!).

The entrance to the tunnel - about a metre across.

 

Four years ago I was carrying out a survey in the tunnel and found a Daubentons Bat (Myotis daubentonii) that was a bit different from the others: it only had one ear. The other appeared to have been torn off. Perhaps the ear had been lost in a predator attack, or maybe the ear had been caught on a thorn in flight. Whatever the cause, most of the ear was missing, though the tragus (the inner part of the ear appeared to be intact). 

Even more interesting was the fact that this bat was carrying a ring. Unlike birds, which are ringed wholesale, bats are only rarely ringed. This is because it isn't possible to ring bats round the leg in the same ways as birds: their tail membrane extend all the way to the ankles. Instead, bat rings are actually horseshoe-shaped and fit loosely over the forearm. The are difficult to fit and the chances of the bat being later injured by the ring is greater than for birds. For this reason bats are only rung as part of specific research projects, with clearly-defined aims. 

"One-ear" - you can see the ring on her left forearm and her missing right ear.

 

So One-ear's ring number was an important piece of information, but the number extends around the forearm, making it impossible to read without disturbing the bat. I decided to leave the bat and returned four weeks later, fervently hoping it was still there (I didn't want to return more quickly, to minimise disturbance to other bats). This time I was equipped with scales and measuring calipers, so that I could measure the bat's weight and forearm length and make an informed decision as to whether, having been disturbed, it was likely to have sufficient fat reserves to complete hibernation safely (A bat carer was standing by, in case it wasn't). Happily One-ear turned out to be a female and have plenty of fat reserves to see her through the winter.

Armed with the ring number I was able to discover something of her history. She had been rung at a summer maternity roost the previous August by Sue Swift and Iain Mackie of Aberdeen University, as part of a research programme. The roost was 35km away in a straight line, but given the hilly nature of the area it's more likely she had followed valleys to the tunnel, making the journey closer to 45km.

Since then she has turned up in the tunnel as regularly as clockwork every January. Whilst it's nice to see her (and she's starting to feel like and old friend) she is also a useful source of information. Normally I can't identify individual bats within the tunnel but One-ear can be easily identified, allowing me to track some of her decisions about where to hibernate within the tunnel.

Whilst I have seen bats with all sorts of injuries, One-ear is the only one-eared bat I have encountered...until last year, when another bat turned up in the tunnel with a very similar injury, but without a ring. So when I carried out the January NBMP survey this year I had my fingers crossed and I'm happy to report that not only was "One-ear" there again, so was "Lugless"!

It's interesting to conjecture the effect that having a missing outer ear might have on an echolocating bat. It is easy to assume that, with only one fully functional ear  a bat might be unable to gain a three-dimensional image of it's surroundings. The outer part of the ear acts in a similar way to a satellite dish, reflecting sounds into the ear and normally a bat can move the ear to channel sounds from varying directions. However the survival of One-ear and now Lugless shows that they are able to make allowances for this disability and carry on navigating and hunting successfully.

Remember it is a criminal offence  in the UK and Europe to disturb roosting bats without an appropriate license. Bats in hibernation are especially vulnerable. Please don't go poking about underground, looking for bats unless you have been properly trained to do so. Not only are you running the risk of prosecution (quite rightly), your actions may be harmful to bats and underground sites can be very dangerous for the uninitiated. If you'd like to get involved join your local bat group and learn how to do it properly (and legally). 

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