Bat Watch

Nathusius Survey, take 3.

I wasn't sure the weather would hold off tonight, but even with light drizzle the bats seemed to love it! With all the heavy rain recently, the reservoir was at an all time high - I'll need to bear that in mind for future surveys! So rather than following the path round the reservoir it was necessary to plough through the heather. I was expecting tonight to be verging on soul destroying, or at least as a minimum, just plain miserable. The first survey was entirely batless, and the last one we had a single, lone bat in the final 10 minutes. Tonight was different. Every walk, and every spot count, we were treated to Soprano pipistrelles flapping about, feeding buzzes a-plenty, and echolocating their little bat hearts out - amazing! With the super powerful million-lumen torch we could track the bats in the torch beam, they're quite content, but it certainly attracted some mega-moths our way... Eek!

So. Summary: no Nathusius pipistrelles. Plenty of sopranos. All in a days work. And I'm very much looking forward to the sonograms.