I love this time of year: the start of the survey season kicks off; the team are fired up and ready to see some bats after so long; new seasonal field ecologists are excited to start their first bat survey season and at last we get to do the surveys which have been stacked up for months, waiting for the start of May.
Perhaps I'm especially enthusiastic, given that these days our team has grown to the point where I can pick and choose which surveys I want to lead and know that the others will be entirely under control, whether I'm there or not.
My first survey of this years season was a great site - a lovely converted farm building alongside a nature reserve. A previous survey of an adjacent building had noted that there was a Soprano pipistrelle maternity roost at the south-facing wall-head, so it was already promising.Just as exciting was that the survey was a "Nellie night". Three shiny new field ecologists, having completed their theoretical and practical training were there for the final stage of their training, where they complete their first actual survey with one-to-one supervision and guidance from one of our experienced people. In the 21st century business world this would be called shadowing, but I rather like the old-fashioned name for it: "sitting next to Nellie". There's nothing quite like seeing the sheer pleasure an early career ecologist gets from putting their training into use for the first time and recording useful bat survey data.
I pointed out the bat droppings under the known maternity site, on the ground, sticking to the wall and on a window-ledge and gave the team a warning. The start of May is a fascinating period, when bat roosting activity is fluid and the greater clarity of roost use we tend to see in the summer hasn't started yet. Just because we know where the maternity site is doesn't mean that that is where the majority of the bats will emerge from - the maternity group probably won't have fully coalesced yet.
I do like it when bats do what I say they're likely to do - so often the gods of bat-work overhear me and take their vengence by ensuring something totally different happens. On this night however, the Sopranos behaved very nicely. In all 175 bats emerged from the building during the survey, 99 from the known maternity site and the remainder in groups of up to 13 from a dozen other roost locations around the building. Classic spring intermediate roosting - a great learning experience for the Nellie-nighters and it will be interesting for them to compare results later in the season with this survey.
There was another early season bonus too. As temperatures tend to drop fairly rapidly after sunset this early in the year, the foraging period is often short and the result of this was that some of the nellie-nighters were able to observe swarming behaviour, as some of the bats returned to the roosts before the end of the sunset survey.
All in all, a really nice survey, but for me the best bit came at the very end, as equipment was being packed away. I'm a strong believer in hiring clever, capable people and empowering them to get on with it, trusting them to make good decisions and telling them not to allow me to micro-manage them. Noticing the contents of one of the survey kits wasn't properly packed away yet I leaned over to deal with it, only to be headed off by one of our brilliant assistant ecologists, who already had the matter in hand. When the team feel sufficently confident to shoo the boss away, with a stern "get away", then I reckon we're getting things about right!
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