A bat evening in Paddock Wood

No Posts for a while

It’s been a while since I last posted a few words about nature sightings around the town. May – September is a busy time for me, working on commercial bat and reptile surveys, as well as my nature wardening duties, so free time has been at a premium for the last six weeks or so.

Bat Surveys

A few weeks ago I upgraded my old bat detector (a BatBox Duet), which has served me well for the last 10 years and bought a state of the art Batlogger M, made in Switzerland by an electronics company called Elekon.  As the name ‘Batlogger’ suggests not only does the detector help me to hear the bat calls, but at the same time it records & logs everything I am hearing and more ! Although more expensive, the Batlogger comes with a great computer software program, which enables me to analyse the bat calls in far greater detail.  For these reasons and more,  many professional bat surveyors are switching to the Batlogger detector in droves !

It has taken me a little while to get to grips with the new machine and software and explore its capabilities, but it has been great fun using it to find out more about the bats in my area.

Whetsted Wood

On Saturday 25 June I popped down to Whested Wood again, after the numerous rain clouds during the afternoon and evening had passed overhead. June 2016 in south east England has been very wet with intense thunderstorms for large parts of the second half of the month. Records will probably reveal this has been one of the wetter Junes during the last 50 years or so, maybe even longer.

Anyway I arrived on the edge of Whetsed Wood, beside the Tudeley Brook, around 9.25pm and awaited the arrival of any bats, to feed along the treeline stream and surrounding fields. All the bat species found in the UK (18 species) feed on insects, during the hours of darkness and usually wake up and start feeding  around sunset. In Paddock wood on the 25^th June sunset was at  9.19pm and I didn’t have to wait long (9.29pm) before the first bat, a Common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) arrived to feed along the trees lining the Tudeley Brook. The bat made four passes along the brook, before flying off in a northerly direction. There was then a break of five minutes before the next two bats, also Common Pips also arrived. Common Pips are one of the most abundant bat species encountered in the UK and are often seen flying around people’s gardens at sunset, feeding upon midges, gnats and other small fly species.   For the next ten minutes feeding activity along the brook was sporadic but slowly increasing.

At 9.37pm I was pleased to hear and see a Noctule bat (Nyctalus noctula) flying high overhead  (about 75 metres high) in the sky about the neighbouring field. It made two passes and then flew away in a westerly direction, towards Five Oak Green. Noctule bats  feed on larger insects, such as moths and beetles and tend to fly much higher in the sky than Pips.

Pip activity hotted up around 9.50pm and for the next 20 minutes the sky was alive with feeding pipistrelles, all common pipistrelles. It was great to hear the sound of the bats, via the detector, as they flew around along the treeline and over the neighbouring fields and woodland.  You have to be quick to catch a glimpse of the bats in the fading light, but a view of a speeding bat, just above head height is great to witness. For the first time in nearly 15 years of watching bats I actually felt the wind rush, caused by the bats wings, as a pip flew past my face;  magical.

By the time I stopped recording at 10.25pm I had recorded 271 bat passes (269 Common Pips & 2 Noctules) totalling an impressive 8614 bat calls over the last hour. That’s not 271 bats, just the number of times a bat flew past my position. Most of the time there were three or four common pips flying around the sky at any one time, but I does give you an idea of just how much distance they must cover and how many calls they make as they hunt for their food.

Organised bat evenings & future bat survival

During the summer many wildlife groups and nature reserve organise bat evenings and if you have never heard bats calling before you are missing out on one of nature’s joys.  All bat species in the UK are legally protected, for their numbers have dropped alarmingly over the last sixty years or so, as we become ever more successful at destroying insects found on farmland.

Fewer insects = less damage to arable crops , but also fewer bats.  We provide subsidies to farmers to provide us with cheap, blemish free vegetables in the supermarket. However, we also increasingly have bat free skies , with fewer areas where bats can find enough food to survive. it’s just one example of a ‘cost to the planet’ which doesn’t appear on the balance sheet !

Let us hope there are still bats flying above the skies of Paddock Wood in 25 years time.