To my children’s dismay and eternal bewilderment, I’ve always preferred DC comics over Marvel.
They’ll still try to surprise with the question every now and then, hoping that it was all an act and have actually always secretly been a Marvel faithful. But to me Batman is one of the all time greats, and up until this year I had bat senses of my own. I could hear bats!
I knew it was coming for a while. I had mindfully noted the many before me who had lamented their loss of audible bat detection, making a earnest promise to embrace and treasure every heard bat until their high pitched calls fell silent.
As far as I know, there is only one British species of bat capable of reaching the human ear drum and that is the Common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) and it is more common for children to hear than adults. I managed to get to 44, but this year, I’ve had to join the rest of the mortals and use technology for my bat fixes.
I have had a bat detector for a while, an EchoMeter II which connects to a phone or tablet and turns the silent echolocation calls into audible clicks. It’s not a cheap tool, but the app interprets the call of all bat species and can identify them for you. It’s so thrilling to hear the space between clicks get tighter as the bats close in on their prey.
This year in early Spring, I was treated to several appearances of an early Common Pipistrelle emergence. At this time our youngest was fairly adamant about staying out on our local green, playing football until you couldn’t see the ball. The upside was that for a few days this Pipistrelle would appear minutes after sunset weaving in the bright sky hoovering up small clouds of midges near its roost (presumably the small cluster of trees opposite our impromptu football pitch). Play would momentarily pause while we watched this aerial artist dance masterfully with the treeline, sometimes swooping in for the flies just metres from our heads. To my delight, this scenario repeated itself for several days.
My favourite British bat (at the time of writing) is the Daubenton’s Bat. Found flying just centimetres over bodies of water to catch insects, occasionally you can even see the ripples as it grabs prey off the surface, sometimes even scoping it up with their feet. One of my favourite spots to watch them is by Ilkley Old Bridge (aka the Packhorse Bridge). Of course, being nocturnal makes watching them more complicated, but not impossible. A few years ago I invested in an infrared monocular which allowed me to enjoy this spectacle for extended hours. More recently I upgraded to a thermal scope which takes the viewing experience to new levels! Standing on a 350 year old bridge, watching thermal dots gliding across the screen as the bat detector reveals their unavoidable echolocation calls. It feels nothing short of sorcery
Many people bemoan the times we live in, and when I watch the news, seeing all the things our children have to navigate that weren’t even on my radar in my childhood, grave concern is a very understandable reaction. Being able to see and hear the invisible world of bats, is a reminder that there is a lot of beauty to be found in our immediate surroundings and that technology can also open up new avenues into worlds that couldn’t even be imagined.