A new invasive species invading homes at Xmas

It's winter, when professional ecologists use the down-time to refresh and update our knowledge. This Christmas a new and invidious invasive species is invading our homes and spreading rapidly, so here I present an important guide to the ecology of this worrying species. I am of course speaking about the Lindt chocolate teddy-bear.

This dangerous invasive is native to the Zurich area of Switzerland, but, like Chinese mitten crabs, skunk cabbage and white-clawed crayfish, human actions have brought them to this country and they are spreading rapidly...dangerously so.

It has been said that we are never more than 6 feet away from a rat. Whilst this is an urban myth, it is possible that Lindt chcololate teddy populations may be growing to the point where it may be true of them. Every day my wife Rona has to spend time searching the house, removing many teddies from their hiding places around the house. Individually they may be cute, but in large numbers their thousand-yard stare becomes alarming and threatening, especially as nobody knows exactly what they are plotting.

What is particularly worrying is the large gaps in our understanding of chocolate teddy ecology. For example, we know little about their diet and where they gain the resources required to support their unusually rapid reproduction. However, there have been sightings of packs of teddies slaying Lindt chocolate reindeer and feasting on them.

The social structure of a teddy colony is complex and unusual, with possible parallels to ant or wasp colonies. As well as being found as individuals, teddies are sometimes found in groups.

There have been very occasional sightings of large accumulations of teddies engaging in mass communication of some kind, with giant queen teddies at the centre of the colony. It is believed that these mass meetings lead to mass dispersal, with teddies hiding around the house, watching and waiting for something. 

More concerning is rare examples of teddies building fortresses from boxes of chocolates.

At present it is not known what is happening in the following picture, but it is possible that some form of sacrifice forms part of teddy social behaviour, with unknown but rather concerning purpose.

It's easy to dismiss Lindt chocolate teddy-bears as being a seasonal and harmless invasive species and particularly tasty and it is true to say that their main predator is my chocaholic wife Rona. However they do seem to breed very rapidly at this time of year and social media does indicate signficiant prublic concern about them.

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Early career ecologists - making progress in winter

Winter, hibernation season for ecologists? Not quite, but it's definitely the time to slow down, write reports, catch up on admin. and take back some of those extra hours we all work during the summer. But what if you're an early career ecologist, who either doesn't have a full-time job yet or whose seasonal role has now ended. How best can you best fill the winter months? Hopefully you've managed to earn enough in the summer to keep you going, but how best to prepare yourself for the next season?

I suspect you'll be spending an inordinate amount of time hunting the job sites, sending out CVs, crafting cover letters (a truly satanic task, if ever there was one) and praying that you'll get the job you know you deserve. Whoah! Stop that negative thought NOW - you DO deserve it. Winter is also peak the peak season for depression. 

Earlier in the year I posted some suggestions for ways to enhance your field skills and improve you chances in the job market (Field skills for early career ecologists and Early career ecologists and hamster-powered scootering). So what can you do to enhance your employability when the weather is wet and grubby and all the interesting wildlife is hibernating (I'm a bat specialist, so that may be a slightly biased view)? 

Here's a thought - how are your bryophyte ID skills? Many moons ago I recall standing, huddled together in the rain with a group of fellow-sufferers whilst Nick Hodgetts bounded enthusiastically around an embankment, showing us different bryophyte species (Nick's a brilliant tutor by the way, and I can recommend the courses he leads). The fact is that bryophytes are often at their best when wet and some species are especially useful for habitat indication. I wrote a post about a few commoner bryophytes a few years back (Right-diddly-wotsit-squirrelly) Since then the British Bryological Society have completed their superlative field guide and I'm happy to say it's very user-friendly and a great addition to your christmas list.

A former member of my survey team got his first break into what has subsequently been a successful career in professional ecology, when he turned up to an interview and was handed a bag full of plant material and asked what he could ID from it. The first thing he noticed was Polytrichum commune - a large and striking moorland moss which, as luck would have it, I'd pointed out to him during an especially boring transect the evening before. Lucky or what? So don't neglect bryophytes! They have a charm all their own.

If you're a member of your local bat group now is the time to start asking about hibernation surveys. Be persistent and make sure they know how keen you are, because for many underground sites numbers need to be limited, to minimise disturbance. Data from these surveys feeds into the critically important National bat monitoring programme and, after having to shelve surveys last winter due to Covid it's really important to gather data this winter (though there's a new risk assessment process). You do, of course, need to accompany someone with an appropriate bat license and not just for legal reasons - underground sites are dangerous. There's more about bat hibernation surveys here: The great hibernaculum hunt and here: The great hibernaculum hunt revisited.

How are your GIS skills? When the weather is miserable, why not delve into QGIS, the free open-access GIS system which has become ever more popular over the past few years? GIS is a core skill for a lot of ecology work and if you're new to QGIS there are many free resources to help you work your way into QGIS. Take a look at The QGIS project.

Finally, winter weather isn't all bad news and there is nothing like freshly fallen snow for finding and identifying animal tracks - another very useful field skill. There are quite a few guides available, but my favourite is Preben Bang and Preben Dahlstrom's book, which has been in print since forever - I remember borrowing an early edition from the library when I was a teenager in the 1970s (the late 1970s, just to be clear!). Don't be put off by the Ray Mears celebrity gimmick on the current edition, it's a really good field guide and well worth hinting to Santa about.

One final thought - when you get that interview and you're sat there, suited and booted and quivering slightly with fear tell them about all the stuff you've done. Maybe it's a British thing, but far too many interviewees assume anything they've done probably isn't good enough and keep quiet about it unless there's a formal certificate or diploma. Take confidence in what you can achieve on your own and in what you have achieved. To prove my point, have a read of Ash Ronaldson's guest blog - Paid bat surveying is an actual, real thing - Ash's first season. Ash has just accepted a full-time job as an Assistant Ecologist. See?

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Ode to a bat-hater

So you’re not at all keen on bats?
You seem to confuse them with rats,
Or birds or possibly cats.
Your thoughts on the matter,
Are mad as a hatter,
If unsure, why didn’t you ask?

 

Bats will get caught in your hair?

To the bat that’s really not fair,

And factually lacking in care.

Your fixed prejudice,

Is a load of old pish,

Though your truth-twisting’s done with real flair.

 

You firmly believe a bat ought,

For sucking of blood to be shot,

Or otherwise nastily caught.

Never forget,

The thing it just ‘et,

Was a midge and not you, you clot

 

Your hatred of bats I hear,

Is drip-fed by the press in your ear,

And based on irrational fear.

If only you’d see,

They’re actually twee,

The world would be better, that’s clear.

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Winter - when the gods of bat-work get sneaky

I’ve written previously about the gods of bat-work, the horde of devious and mischievous god-lets, who supervise all aspects of bat-work and amuse themselves at our expense. As we move towards winter bats begin to think about hibernation and bat ecologists relax. But the bat-gods stay awake. Without wakeful bats and busy surveys to interfere with they seek new ways to entertain themselves through the dark, damp days of winter…

They shift their attention from field-work to cosy offices, to seek ways to entertain themselves. Whilst we make the most of the warm and dry they are quietly poking about in our cupboards, drawers and storage boxes, seeking out bat detectors. With great glee the bat god of batteries changes our nice Duracells and Eneloops for manky old leaking horrors, so that when spring comes and we dig out our nice shiny bat detector we find it's battery compartment awash with disgusting chemical gunk, rendering the detector useless. 

Winter report-writing makes the bat-god of computing very happy. Over the years he has had to change his tactics, since auto-save robbed him of his favourite trick: making the lap-top crash with several hours of work un-saved. Now he has branched out into messing with broadband connections, so that just when you are trying to upload something big to the cloud, the bandwidth drops until it seems like the rest of your life will be spent, staring at that damned rotating circle.

Bat call analysis software allows the bat-god of echolocation many opportunities to have his fun. Almost daily the Insight and Kaleidoscope Facebook groups have plaintive messages from people who have found their favourite package doesn't work how it did yesterday in some subtle, frustrating and inexplicable way. Inevitably we blame the latest software update for those wasted hours, but the bat-gods know better.

Winter is the time when we bat ecologists re-discover a strange and half-forgotten thing called a social life and begin to enjoy going out in the evening, eating out, meeting friends and generally acting like normal human beings (you'll notice I say like normal human beings).

This disgraceful bat-free happiness infuriates the bat-gods, who believe that we should be entirely focused on them at all times. Inevitably their vengence is devious and nasty. Remember that office party when your 'hilarious' secret santa gift bombed horribly? Who do you think it was who whispered that idea in your ear? When you've a hot dinner date and your car won't start, it's not the cold weather wiping out the battery - there's a giggling little bat-god under the bonnet. And when you’re trudging miserably through ice, slush, hail and freezing cold, never forget it all exists simply because the gods of bat-work want you to look forward to the next survey season!

More about the gods of bat-work:

Ignore the gods of bat-work at your peril

Further news from the gods of bat-work

The squircles of bat-worker hell

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"Paid bat surveying is an actual, real thing! - Ash's first season

The best part of my job is working with people I'm sure will take professional bat work and ecology to the next level in the future and helping them to move their careers forward. Here, Ash Ronaldson describes her first summer with us as a seasonal field ecologist.

First, a quick introduction: I’m Ash, a mature student in the final year of my BSc in Ecology. I’ve worked and volunteered in many different sectors and roles over the years, but a career involving bats in some way has always been the dream. It took me an awfully long time to discover that bat surveying is an actual, real thing that I could get paid to do, but here I am at last! I enjoyed my first season so much that I wrote a little about it on my LinkedIn, and David kindly invited me to expand on that here.

I couldn’t have dreamed up a more perfect summer job if I tried, nor a better company to start my ecology career with. I’ve learned more in these three months than I imagined possible; from bat ecology, calls and legal protections, to what goes into a survey report, how bat consultancy “works”, and radio tracking.

One of the biggest highlights was getting to see swarming behaviour during dawn surveys - I always knew that bats communicated to make group decisions about roosting locations, but I had never seen the process in action before. A bat will land briefly (indicating potential roost location) before speedily taking off again, somehow managing not to collide with all the others flying around it. This can continue for a while, sometimes with a few bats choosing to enter the roost or all going somewhere else entirely. On these surveys, my job was to keep track of the location of roost entrances (or exits on sunset surveys), counting how many bats entered or emerged from the area of the building I’d been assigned to watch. I have to say, this is far easier said than done when there are multiple roost entrances, hundreds of bats flying around you, and you’re a bit busy grinning like an idiot because it’s your first swarm and you can’t believe you’re really being paid to stand there.

Every surveyor has a detector with an earpiece, and we are given lots of training before embarking on surveys so that we can identify any species of bat present. It can be tricky though, and this is where surveys with multiple species (my record is five in one night!) were a particularly helpful treat. No amount of listening to online clips compares to having several species fly past you one after the other - suddenly the differences between calls “click” into place (somewhat literally!) in your mind.

(Photo by Scott Bland)

Also helpful with this learning curve is the way that surveys at DDAL (David Dodds Associates Ltd.) are run; when anyone sees or hears a bat, this is communicated via radio to the lead surveyor who is roaming between us. I picked up some great ID tips this way – if someone was unsure what they’d heard, they would describe the call, and the lead surveyor would help identify the species. When I heard the same call on my own detector later, I was able to identify it.

What I hadn’t expected was the lead surveyor spending time with each of us during almost every survey, and how invaluable these chances to chat with more experienced ecologists would be for me. I’m one of these people who craves knowledge; the more I learn, the more questions I come up with (and I had plenty to begin with – sorry, team!). Thankfully, it’s easy to learn from people so passionate about their work and happy to share their experiences. I enjoyed this immensely.

(Photo by Scott Bland)

To wrap up the season, I had the privilege of (voluntarily) participating in some bat radio tracking. To facilitate this, a tiny radio transmitter is carefully attached to the bat’s back (by appropriately trained and licenced professionals), and the bat is safely released where it was found. The challenge for the team each evening - paired up for safety and with radios for communication - was to use receivers with large antennas to track down the location of our roosting tagged bats, then follow them as they left to see where they would forage and eventually choose to roost for the night. Up and down hills, over rough terrain and slipping in mud we went, sometimes losing the signal several times in an evening, and wandering around in circles in the dark or triangulating with another team to find it again. Much as I grumped about the hills, it really was a lot of fun!

Sadly, the 2021 season has now come to a close. Although some nights were less enjoyable than others (drizzly urban surveys with far more humans than bats, for example), I genuinely learned something new on every single one. Being part of such a welcoming, supportive team has been a privilege, and I can’t wait to see what next year holds.

Ash

linkedin.com/ashronaldson | t: @NotFraxinus

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Seasonal field ecologists - the future of ecology

Part of our 2016 team at a training event. This group includes three future PhDs, four future consultant ecologists, four who went on to work with conservation NGOs and one who now works in wildlife rehabilitation.

In 2010 our company (David Dodds Associates Ltd) first began recruiting and training our specialist team of seasonal field ecologists who usually work with us for between two and four seasons. We tend to recruit early-career ecologists, undergraduate and postgraduate students or recent graduates and this gives a dual benefit. We can train them to carry out bat surveys to our specific standards and methods and we are also able to shape the future of professional ecology and equip some of the next generation of professional ecologists with a sound knowledge of bat conservation and ecology. To date 124 people have worked with us and many are now working in consultancies, SNCOs, NGOs etc in the UK and abroad, giving me a great deal of personal satisfaction, watching their careers progress.

We aim to maximise the benefit to our team of working with us, as this helps build a committed and enthusiastic team:

1. We provide our seasonal field ecologists with full training at the start of their career and commit to ensuring that, when they leave us they have as sound and as broad a knowledge of bat conservation as possible and we do this in several ways:
2. Every survey is treated as a training opportunity, with the site discussed beforehand, in terms of bat suitability, habitat etc.
3. Each seasonal field ecologist has one-to-one time with the lead ecologist during virtually every survey, to discuss the survey and results and broader questions of bat ecology and conservation.
4. We aim to provide additional training and resources, beyond that required for the specific work of the field ecologists, giving them opportunities to get involved in winter hibernation surveys, bat box checks and so on.
5. More experienced members of our team are given the opportunity to train for bat licenses in-house, if they wish.
6. We run a long-term project at Whitmuir organic farm, near Penicuik, where members of the team have the opportunity to get involved in advanced bat survey techniques such as harp-trapping, use of acoustic lures, radio-tracking etc.

We try to foster a team spirit amongst our field ecologists and reward success. We have lively (and often irreverent) private social media groups on Whatsapp and Facebook, we host an annual all-expenses dinner for the team and most importantly there is our ‘donut policy’. This states that, at urban surveys, surveys with low bat activity or ones with potentially irritating interactions with the public, donuts are provided at the end as a morale-raiser (on occasions pain au chocolat are substituted at dawn).

A post-survey donut feeding frenzy after a sunset survey in a rough urban area.

I always remind team members that they are intelligent, capable people. Just because they are at an early stage of their careers doesn't mean they can't have a good idea or spot a weakness in what we do. In fact, coming to it with fresh eyes means they are more likely to do so and we've adopted numerous suggestions and enhancements over the years. This approach of constant improvement ensures we keep reviewing and improving what we do and encourages all of our team to feel valued.

Wherever possible all promoted positions within our company are recruited either from within the current team of seasonal field ecologists or from previous team members, helping to show our commitment to them, as well as ensuring we promote people we already know to be competent. A great example of this is Charlotte Meyer-Wilson, who started with us whilst studying her MSc and was promoted to full-time Assistant Ecologist when she graduated. At the end of that season she moved on, working as a consultant with two other consultancies, before returning to us as a fully-fledged consultant ecologist and licensed bat specialist.

Charlotte Meyer-Wilson, surveying a Brown Long-eared bat roost near Edinburgh

I find that this approach gives us a highly committed and enthusiastic team of field ecologists, who enjoy their work and are dedicated to doing it well. I firmly believe that this is essential to the consistent delivery of good professional standards of survey work. Just as importantly, we can all enjoy our work.

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Chirps in the noise - the hunt for a missing bat

“Chirp…chirp…chirp.” I’m sitting on a clump of grass, with the farms and villages of the Dead burn valley laid out in front of me, one or two lights beginning to come on as the light begins to fail. “Chirp…chirp…chirp.” I’m holding a directional yagi antenna, pointed towards some farm buildings below me and on my lap sits a strongly-built radio receiver. The gain is set to maximum and the signal strength meter bounces to the right, in time with each sound. 

This is a pleasantly relaxing moment, watching the world winding down and waiting for my target to show its face. Before long I will leap into action, but for now I can just wait and relax.

A walk-in-talkie clipped to my jacket crackles. “Nothing yet.” says a remote voice. 400 feet below me and about half a kilometer as the crow flies, a couple of young ecologists with similar equipment are standing in the farmyard, waiting for a Common pipistrelle to emerge from her roost. We’ve been following this bat for several nights and are starting to build a picture of her nightly behavior. But a couple of times she has simply disappeared from the area where she spends most of her time and we haven’t yet succeeded in finding her before she returns. But tonight we’re ready for her.

Glued to the fur on her back with a special rubbery glue is a minuscule radio transmitter, half the size of my little fingernail, it’s hair-thin wire antenna trailing over her tail. It’s tiny battery produces a tiny radio signal - a steady series of chirps we can only hear if there is nothing between us and her. Not too hard perhaps in the flatlands of East Anglia, but here in the southern uplands of Scotland it’s an exciting challenge - every fold in the land is capable of blocking the signal, so that we hear nothing.

 

The radio crackles again. “She’s out.” The chase is on. Almost immediately the sound changes and the strength of the chirps vary, as she flies round the farm buildings, the old sandstone walls attenuating the signal. I slowly move the antenna to the left a few degrees and check the signal. It’s louder. To the right again. It’s quieter. Constant adjustments and checks allow me to keep track of her. The team below are doing the same and we constantly share compass bearings. She is roughly where they intersect on the map. They give chase, but my tack is to monitor from my hill-top eyrie and help them fill the gap.

True to form, after forty minutes of foraging around the tree-lined margins of a large pig-field she suddenly makes a move. I’m alerted by the fleet-footed team below and a moment later “we’ve lost her.” But I still have a faint signal for another few seconds before she disappears and I get that all-important bearing. A check of the contours on the Ordnance survey map reveal a fold  in the land in that direction, with a tree-lined pond. I vector the team onto it and off they go. Ten minutes later the walk-in-talkie crackles with a triumphant shout. “Got her!”

 

I sit back onto my comfy clump of grass, satisfied with another piece fitted into the jigsaw of this bat’s behaviour. With a sigh of satisfaction I change the frequency of the detector, to see what’s happening with the bat that team two are following.

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In the bat-caves with a camera

People are often surprised to discover that my first degree was in medieval history, rather than ecology. As it happens I'm also qualified to decode Morse code, carry out psychometric testing and chair legal tribunals, but none of these are relevant either and just show how my career wandered about before I found my forte! But the history of science can be an intriguing cross-over - how did our knowledge of bats and ecology arrive where it is now and who did the ground-work for us?

Back in 2009 I wrote a couple of articles on this subject: The 'diffusion of useful knowldge' and An 1892 bat-worker. I recently came across another article from 1898, written by T.A.Coward in a magazine called "Wide World", describing efforts by he and his friend MR R. Newstead of Chester to photograph bats in various British caves, at a time when photography hadn't progressed far from the formal staged photographs of the Victorian era.

Reading articles of this vintage can be startling at times. Back then natural history was not the conservation movement it now is. Much of the damage we are now desperately trying to repair had yet to be done to the natural world by the technological and chemical advances of the twentieth century and wildlife was seen as an abundant resource, to be drawn from freely in order to study it. Our modern views on the humane treatment of animals were also in their infancy. We have to grit our teeth and set these things aside if we want to listen to the voices of our forebears in the light of the world they lived in at the time.

Despite that, it's possible to see that many of the problems we face today were just as problematic to the Victorian natural historian:

"...the naturalist thinks little of experiences like these, and if his clothes are dirty and his hair is full of mud as he walks home, looking like a bricklayer's labourer, what does it matter...?"

That sounds like many a hibernaculum survey I have done. He goes one to remind us that he is talking from one and a quarter centuries ago when he continues...

"...if in his pocket he has his treasures, and when he arrives he will be able to examine or photograph his little friend the bat."

Oops. He also mentions a Daubenton's Bat he "had wounded", swimming itself to shore, which makes uncomfortable reading for us today, as does hearing that Coward:

"...once received a large number of these bats from the North of Scotland."

A powerful comparison with today can be seen, when he talks about gaining access to bats, to study them:

"We have found the best way to obtain them alive is to search for them in their native caves... We have scrambled about in the semi-darkness lit only by the guttering, greasy candles, our boots sticking in the wet clay..."

Hand-held bat detectors were almost a century away, let alone infra-red cameras. Even the electric torch was about twenty years away. Whatever we may think about taking bats home to photograph (whether dead or alive), there's no doubt that this was hard-core work! 

Newstead also took pictures of bats in situ in caves, though arguably the magnesium flares he had to use for illumination must have impacted on the poor subject bats. Nonetheless, it's exciting to see his photographs, which must surely be some of the earliest pictures of bats in their roosts. However, some of his portrait pictures are very definitely of dead and possibly taxidermied specimens!

I've written before about how weird occurances and bat-work seem to go hand-in-hand (Bat surveys - where odd stuff is normal, There's nowt so queer as folk and What is it about bat surveys?) It seems things was no different in 1898:

"...we entered an old lead working in Derbyshire, and just as we were striking a light (presumably to light a candle!) we were suddenly backed into by a cow that had been sheltering from the hot sun in the cool recesses of the cave."

Coward's love of bats might not always be apparent in his approach to studying them, but it certainly in in his prose:

"The Whiskered bat, a neat little fellow..."

"The Pipistrelle, or Flittermouse, is a pocket edition of the Noctule."

"Perhaps the quaintest of our commoner species is the Long-eared bat...as it turns its beady little eyes towards us, twitching its great ears, it seems to be asking who it is that is so rudely disturbing it."

Early naturalists like Coward and Newstead helped to build the early foundation towards an understanding of bats that we are still building and though their methods are alien to us today, we still owe them a debt. Coward wasn't shy of using his magazine article to address some anti-bat prejudices that seem very familar today:

"...wherever we go we are told stories of the "nasty things" flying in through windows, atttacted to sheets hanging up to dry, or getting entangled in ladies' hair. We only know they will never fly through windows, they never come when we hang up sheets and they take great care to keep away, not only from our heads, but well out of arms reach."

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Super-speedy-cheap bat surveys!

Roll up, roll up people, get them while they’re hot,

Super-speedy-cheap surveys, with a detector that I’ve got.

It’s just a cheap detector, neither broad-band nor much use,

But the guidelines are too complex, so I play fast and loose.

My customers know no better, of standards they know not,

As long as I’m cheap and cheerful and the council accept the lot.

The council had an ecologist, laid off due to cuts,

So now I hardly need to lie, in my reports from ‘Comic Cuts’. 

This building needs six people, but we are only three:

My granny, Fred from down the pub and little ‘bat expert’ me.

The client will not notice, so in my report I’ll lie,

And say that there were eight of us, well-equipped and spry.

Granny keeps on wandering and often needs a pee,

And Fred knows nowt about bats, but bull-sh*ts as good as me.

I’ve two more surveys on tonight, so they I must invent,

For we are Super-speedy-cheap, for clients heaven-sent.

Of course I have a license - a really nice one too,

Signed off thirty years ago, by a mate, works down the zoo.

They tell me conservation law has changed in all that time,

It matters not - I always turn, a blind eye to wildlife crime.

We very rarely find a roost, in fact I prefer not to,

It makes my clients happier and keeps us speedy too.

When Licensing’s required, you won’t see me for dust,

For fear of being found out and maybe going bust.

So I’ll keep on doing what I do, and getting away with it,

Doing surveys cheap and quick, but honestly quite sh*t.

I’m hoping council funding continues to be pathetic,

‘Cos neither them, nor SNCOs have time to see I’m at it.

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The forthcoming Anabat Chorus - first impressions

Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to do passive monitoring of bats you had three options - the proven and dependable sandwich-box-shrouded Anabat SD1, with it's ZC recording system (seems clunky now, but was heaven-sent in those days of memory-deprivation and snail-like computers) or the Songmeter SM2 from the then new kids on the block, Wildlife Acoustics. Option three was to cobble up some kind of half-baked system with a basic detector plugged into a dictaphone and plenty of us dabbled with that sort of thing! Today  however, the marketplace is full of options and new models keep trickling onto the market.

Wildlife Acoustics recently launched the Songmeter Mini and I'll say more about that in another post, but there is a clear move towards lower-cost passive monitoring machines, possibly in response to the development of the incredibly low-cost Audiomoth. When you can buy a passive detector for thirty quid (extra for the polythene bag to hang it in!) then £1300 or more seems excessive. However, for professional work the Audiomoth seems an uncertain option, with too much geekery involved. Though that will probably change in time, it creates an opening for the manufacturers to slide in new mid-range passive detectors, drawing on their experience and reliability. 

The new Anabat Chorus

Andrew Dobson of Titley Scientific was kind enough to lend me a beta model of their forthcoming new machine, the Anabat Chorus. I've long been quite keen on Anabat equipment - it's not perfect (what is?), but Titley tend to listen carefully to customers and build on what they learn from each model. The Chorus is a good example. At first sight the case looks similar to the Swift and Express models, both of which are a pig to open, as the latches are incredibly tight - a necessity, to seal the case against moisture ingress. The solution is rather elegant - a large lever-type arrangement applies one of those first physics lessons we learned at school and makes opening and sealing the case much easier. There are also pierced flanges top and bottom, increasing the options for attaching the case to a substrate, especially useful for longer-term installations.

Inside the case, at first sight it seems similar to the Swift and has most of the functionality, but instead of the sexy (and costly) touch-screen, the screen is more basic, with up/down/left/right buttons. The battery case takes four AA batteries, but with Eneloops (the rechargeables of the gods), that should give many weeks of recording, in fact Titley claim 40 nights is possible. And they've retained the easily accessible back-up battery, so you can change it yourself when needed. As with most equipment nowadays, GPS is built-in, ensuring that that accurate sunset and sunset times can be depended on. There's also a temperature sensor, though personally, I rarely trust the data from in-built sensors. The detector is not always in the best location to get sensible data, so I tend to use a separate temperature datalogger in a shady spot nearby.

The interior of the machine and the controls - essentially a budget version of the Swift controls, but without losing anything vital that I could find

Rear view, showing the pierced mounting flanges and the lever arrangement, for opening the case with breaking a finger

In use, I found it to function exactly as expected, with similar funtionality to the Swift, using the control panel to select simpler timing options or a new software package to allow custom settings. As with the Swift, you can record ultrasound as .zc or.wav. There was a little distortion in the recordings, though this was probably due to reflections off the case. You can't use an extension lead with the microphone, as with the Swift, but Dean Thompson from Titley advises that there'll be an optional goose-neck extension to move it away from the case and reduce this effect. 

The optional microphone gooseneck

(photo copyright Titley Scientific)

I'm happy to say that they have retained that wonderfully simple crowd-pleaser, the little magnet on a string. This allows you to check the machine is functioning properly once it's in position - rarely essential, but massively reassuring before you walk away, trusting that when you return in three weeks time the detector will have recorded as expected.

Considering that the Chorus will retail at £595 +VAT I was a bit bemused as to where the savings had been made, by comparison to the rather pricey Swift (currently £1194 + VAT from NHBS).  According to Dean, the main differences are:

• You can't use an extension mic lead (the gooseneck will cost extra)
• The machine can only use 4 AA batteries, unlike the choice of 4 or 8 with the Swift.
• It only has one memory card slot, instead of two (but with the massive capacity cards now available, that's hardly a problem).
• You can only record from one microphone at a time.

What's this I hear you ask? "One of two microphones"? The Chorus has an acoustic microphone as well as an ultrasonic one, giving you the chance to record birds, frogs, crickets or whatever else takes your fancy (for £200 less you;ll be able to get one with just the acoustic mic). It has the same ultrasonic microphone element as the Swift (though they're not interchangeable). 

One concern I have is that the microphones seem quite vulnerable, as they are attached to mouldings on the case. The Swift and Express come with excellent protective carry-cases, but apparently that won't be the case for the Swift, so I think a protective case to store and transport it will be an essential extra.

In this view you can see the two microphones, ultrasonic on the left, acoustic on the right.

Overall I was quite impressed with what we'll get for the price-point. I was also impressed that most of what has been removed to get the price down is unlikely to be missed much and that Titley have taken the opportunity to add some simple enhancements that improve the package. It's disappointing that the gooseneck microphone mount will be an additional cost over the basic price, but they are going to have Wildlife Acoustic's Songmeter Mini to compete with and I reckon that will be a fair fight. 

The machine I was trying out was a beta model, so the final product may be slightly different. And if you want a seriously techie appraisal you'll need to look elsewhere - my musings here are for those of us who want to actually use the machine, rather than devour the specifications! But if that floats your boat you can find the full specification on Titley's website: Anabat Chorus

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PS - the photos above show a foam sock on the ultrasonic mic, but it belongs on the acoustic mic (when I tested it, it was on the correct mic!)

The dawn survey dirge

I promised I wouldn't do this again.

I lied.

A particularly dismal dawn survey inspired me (is there such a thing as negative inspiration?) to write a Dawn survey dirge. Can you tell it's almost the end of the survey season and I'm flagging a bit?!

It's to be sung to the tune of 'When a felon's not engaged in his employment' from 'The Pirates of Penzance'. If you're not familiar with it, here's the original - YouTube

When the sun is not engaged in it's employment,
And the caffeine isn’t doing what it ought,
The pre-dawn chilliness, it feels hell-sent,
And you regret the Esso sandwich that you bought.

Our reluctance we with difficulty smother,
When dawn surveying duty’s to be done,
We must drag ourselves from one bed or another,
A bat-worker’s lot’s a really crappy one.

When dawn surveying duty’s to be done, to be done,
A bat-worker’s lot’s a really  crappy one, crappy one.
 
When the trip-hazard is in utter darkness hidden,
And a moth flies in your ear, causing stress,
Whilst mosquitos gnaw upon you most unbidden,
And your sweeties have become a soggy mess.

When your folding camp-chair under you has broken,
And rain-water, it is seeping in your boot,
Whilst your bat detector firmware won’t awaken,
And you fear your head-torch battery’s up the chute.

When dawn surveying duty’s to be done, to be done,
A bat-worker’s lot’s a really  crappy one, crappy one.

When I inflicted 'The bat identification song' upon the world several mischievous people suggested I should post a video of myself singing it, or even perform it at their bat group or a conference. There are several problems with this, chiefly that my singing voice resembles a part-strangled cat having its genitals mangled whilst gargling. But feel free to step in - YouTube, fame and fortune awaits the brave!

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Sunset and sunrise surveys - maximising quality

We're fortunate in the UK to have good practice guidelines for bat surveys, though interpretation of these can cause challenges. Surveys inevitably require numbers of surveyors and ways of sourcing these include:

• Teams of fully qualified ecologists, usually in larger companies.
• Office staff and other professionals, given task-specific training.
• Sub-contractors.
• Division of a survey into several segments, allowing two or three surveyors to complete it over several nights.
• Recruitment of a specific team of specially-trained seasonal field ecologists.

Many smaller regional companies like ourselves use sub-contractors. Our experience of this was that it led to inconsistencies in equipment used, levels of experience or training and the quality and accuracy of data recording. Some consultancies achieve excellent standards using sub-contractors, but it wasn't for us.

Our approach to emergence and re-entry surveys is a little different to that practised by many consultancies. The ‘standard’ approach involves each surveyor working individually to watch their section of the subject structure and record what they see, whilst making a digital record of the bat calls heard, allowing for later analysis. Whilst this approach is widely used, we identified several potential weaknesses with it:

1. When surveyors are asked to record their own data they are forced to take their eyes away from the subject structure for perhaps 30 seconds each time they wish to note anything down (some consultancies use digital audio recorders to avoid this problem). As a non-breeding roost may only contain one-or two animals this may lead to roosts being missed.
2. Writing down notes also requires artificial light at times, resulting in degradation of the surveyors’ night vision for five minutes or more.
3. Even the most diligent of surveyors may lose focus without some degree of supervision and encouragement during a two hour survey.
4. As each segment of the subject structure is effectively surveyed separately, it can be challenging to link movements of bats around the site.
5. Recreating the entire survey at a later date, based on several sets of notes and recordings is an excellent opportunity for error and misunderstanding to creep in.
6. It is challenging for the ecologist in charge of the survey to gain a full and broad understanding of the progress of the survey if they also have to focus on one specific section of the building themselves.
7. If something arises during the survey, which without attention would limit the survey results, for example equipment failure, disturbance by members of the public etc. the ecologist in charge is poorly-placed to react and limit the impact if they are tied to one survey location.
8. Individual surveyors may feel isolated and gain little from the experience.

To address these concerns and improve our own standards of survey work we implemented our own approach in 2007 and have continually fine-tuned it ever since.

1. One key difference in our approach is that we deploy a lead ecologist who is usually a licensed bat-worker and who is additional to the surveyors needed to visualise all the relevant parts of the surveyed structure. This may seem profligate, but it allows the lead surveyor to do a much better job of managing the survey:
2. The lead ecologist is able to build up a full picture of the survey, avoidiong the need to decipher lots of notes at a later date.
3. They are equipped with a bat detector with live sonogram display, allowing many uncertain bat calls to be identified there and then, reducing the amount of post-survey analysis required.
4. Supervision of the team is continuous, as the lead ecologist moves around the site, responding to problems, dealing with members of the public. This gives an enhanced level of safety and ensures each surveyor is part of the team.
5. The lead ecologist is able to spend time with each surveyor, developing their knowledge and ensuring that they gain in experience from every survey.

A further point of difference is our method of communication. Field ecologists are trained not to take their eyes off the structure they are surveying and do not take any notes. Each is equipped with a personal radio and all bat activity is communicated to the lead ecologist using this. Not only does this reduce the risk of roosts being missed, it allows the lead ecologist to build an understanding of the entire survey as it happens, so that any shortfalls or concerns can be immediately addressed. All notes are then taken by the lead ecologist (or by an additional field ecologist at especially busy or complex sites).

Communicating survey data by radio means that all surveyors are aware of everything that is happening during the survey. This assists with remaining focused through a quiet survey and further enhances the survey as a learning opportunity. It also allows individual surveyors to efficiently link bat activity they see with that seen by other surveyors. For example, the risk of confusion between bats emerging from a complex roof structure and those overflying it is reduced. 

Sadly, it is never possible to separate bat consultancy work from the reality that we operate in a competitive industry and costs are important. It may seem that having an additional person on each survey is an untenable additional cost and is likely that many clients would be unwilling to pay  for this. We do not factor this in when costing work. Better to accept a lower profit margin but be satisfied that we are delivering the very best standards of survey we are able to. We find that, with our approach the amount of ‘post-game analysis’ necessary after each survey is significantly reduced, as less de-ciphering of notes and analysis of recorded calls is required. This saving goes a long way towards balancing any additional cost.

I am not suggesting that our approach to emergence and re-entry survey is the best or ‘right’ way to conduct them. Each consultancy must develop their own approach, based on the resources available to them, the economic framework in which they operate and the scale and complexity of the surveys they carry out. However, good practice can only be good practice when it is openly shared and discussed. Our approach has been developed and fine-tuned over fourteen years and works very well for us. I hope it may be of use to others in helping to form their own approach to these surveys.

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