Angie the Stockgrove co-ordinator writes
Last night’s survey was warm and a little muggy. But no rain!!!!
The first Soprano was heard just 4 minutes after sunset. There was limited activity from Sopranos with only 1 sighting out of 10 detections. A solitary Noctule over the lake and all the roost’s and boxes were empty. The Daubentons were out from around 18 minutes past sunset with continuous activity until the end and 99 passes through the torch light.
Dick spotted another possible tree roost, this brings the total number of trees to check to 9.
As it wasn’t raining we also able to try out a something new. We set up a bat detector and recorder at the point we count the Daubenton’s and ran it all the time we were on the site. In a piece of woodland just behind we fixed another detector onto an 8.4m pole and left it to record at canopy height. We will be looking at the calls to see if we pick up different things. Toby took some video footage of the Daubenton’s over the lake. The picture above was posed by models at an earlier photoshoot in broad daylight The bats is a puppet and we had attached it to a long piece of cane. We got some very strange looks from a passing dogwalker and scurried home to play with photoshop.
It was great to be able to sit dry and warm – and it was almost nice to get the first mosquito bites of the year ( almost but not quite).