The story so far.

Kevin Frediani, Curator of Plants at the Royal Zoological Society and bat group member started working on the Whipsnade Hibernaculum Project.

 

In 2005 we trialed a monitoring protocol

In 2006 Kevin moved to a new post in Holland but the work continued and we monitored activity from February to September.( with help from some of the Whipsnade volunteers) Bob Cornes gave a presentation on this work at a ZSL Natural Species conference. To our delight, as a result of this, a parallel monitoring project was set up between Regents Park and the London Bat Group.

In 2007, with two year's data under our belts, we simplified the protocol a little and got rid of the mini disc recorders which had continued to prove unreliable

 

Now read on

 

In 2008 in addition to the monthly surveys on the established routes, we are planning three additional dates to survey promising areas off the survey routes in the hope of locating some roosts The dates for the 2008 regular surveys are shown in the table below.

 

 

 

Month	Date	Start time
Apr	Tue 1st	7.25pm
May	Tue 6th	8.20pm
Jun	Tue 3rd	9.00pm
Jul	Tue 1st	9.15pm
Aug	Tue 5th	8.300pm
Sep	Tue 2nd	7.35pm

 

The additional survey dates are

 

Month	Date	Start time
May	Fri 9th	7.25pm
July	Fri 1th	9.05pm
Sep	Fri 12th	7,10pm

 

 

 

	Now the Bedfordshire Bat group is trying to find out more about the bats that use the Whipsnade site.   This will form a baseline from which to measure the effect of the bat-friendly landscaping he is producing.   Click here for more information on 2005's work on the Zoological Society of London's site.   Map courtesy of the Royal Zoological Society

 

 

 

Other activities

 

Click here for a full list of other activities you could get involved with

 

There are lots of photos of Whipsnade in the photogallery