Bat Group Archives

2006 BAT NEWS

This year has been a very busy one for us with many local bat surveys plus a couple of bat surveys for the Bat Conservation Trust.

Local walks not only took in the serious work of detecting bats but also enabled us to enjoy a pleasant walk during the evening in most of our reserves (Strawberry Line, Stowey, Littlewood and Congresbury Moor). In addition we had several short walks around St Mary's Church in Yatton and St Andrew's Church in Congresbury. Tony visited St Andrews School and led a small group of pupils around their playing field much to the delight of the children and their parents especially since the bats gave a good display! In the summer some of us were invited to a school assembly at St Andrew's, Congresbury, where we presented the children with three bat boxes for their conservation area.

The group took part in two national surveys for the Bat Conservation Trust. The first one was around Claverham following a triangular shaped route within a randomly allocated 1km square. The aim was to record noctules and serotines whilst walking twelve predetermined distances and pipistrelles (common and soprano) at the twelve stopping points. This route had to be followed on two separate occasions in July. The second survey was along the river at Congresbury detecting and recording Daubenton bats at each stop. It was fascinating watching them skim along just above the water.

In October James Field from North Somerset Levels and Moors Project helped us to check the 23 boxes at Littlewood. We were really pleased to discover that a lot of the boxes had been used by bats and the icing on the cake was to find three pipistrelle bats roosting in three separate boxes. This really made up for what turned out to be a very wet trip due to a thunder storm.

During the winter we hope to study the various recordings made during the year using the Batscan software to try and identify the species of bat recorded.

It's certainly been a wacky year for the bat group. So why not try looking at the following web sites:-
www.bats.org.uk
Bat Bazaar on www.bats.org.uk
Alana Ecology on www.alanaecology.com
Batbox Ltd on www.batbox.com