Bat Night -August 2019

Late afternoon on a Monday in August the Wessex Home Education Group met together with Jenny from the Wiltshire Bat Group at Underhill. To begin the session we listened to a talk from Jenny. This was fascinating and included information about which bats are normally found in this area, their migration routes and echolocation. Whilst learning about bats from around the world we were particularly interested to learn that some of the larger bats can use their eyes to hunt for food.

After the talk we had a delicious dinner cooked on the BBQ and started to prepare for the walk. To be able to hear the bats we had bat detectors that would bring the calls down to a lower frequency which is audible to human ears. This also meant that the bats were not disturbed by us listening to their sounds.

The bats we heard while walking around the land were:

Common Pipistrelle

Soprano Pipistrelle

Brown Long Eared

Serotine

Noctule

Myotis

Thank you very much to Jenny for a fabulous evening and to Jonathan for hosting us.

Before we left for the night we set up a Robinson moth trap ready for our next session the following day