Today a group of about 28 people came to the bat evening, first Richard had prepared wood and got us to turn into bat boxes. Everybody enjoyed making them. We then had a quiz to find out how much knowledge we had on bats which turned out to be not much.
Then Sarah Butcher from the Devon bat society came and spoke about bats in general, how many types of bats and that all the bats use different frequencies in their calls. She provided us with bat detectors which listen at various frequencies which we set and then started to walk around Julian's field. At first we heard nothing, but in one section by the hedge and trees, our bat detectors went wild and we picked up six different types of bats! Sarah was so informative and was able to tell us which bat we were listening to from the frequency they gave out. At times a bat would fly straight over us and the sound from the detectors became very loud. She set up an infrared camera to see the bats, as they get scared by bright lights and will not fly around.
Unfortunately, bats come out and feed and then go and rest, so at nearly 10:30 the bats had gone to roost and only one or two were seen.
Everybody agreed that it was an excellent evening.
