On Thursday we waited with excitement to see what had happened to the numbers at the soprano pipistrelle roost. Would they have increased further? Would the bats have given birth to their pup?. It was a warm night with lots of small insects just waiting to be caught and we settled down to count. No sooner had they begun to exit than some bats returned to the roost – s sure sign that there were pups inside. It also made counting difficult but fortunately we had enough people that one person could concentrate on returning bats. By the end of the evening slightly fewer bats had emerged than a fortnight ago and we took advantage of the clear and warm evening to walk through the nearby woods.
Griffin bat detector Photo Bob Cornes
Earlier in the evening we had strapped our Griffin detector to a tree and in the hour and a half our was there it recorded 183 passes. Most of which proved to be common pipistrelles. We didn’t pick up any Noctules ourselves and had commented how unusual this was, but the Griffin succeeded where we failed, but it didn’t get the close view of a buzzard that we had.
It also picked up some nice social calls, some we could identify as pipistrelles. Others eluded identification