A Bat Detector Workshop

I volunteered at Wild Wednesday again this week with Derbyshire Wildlife Trust doing sweep netting, campfire bread and various other nature related activities and crafts. There was a staff & volunteer workshop (with a few places for the public too) that evening so we planned to have campfire cooked baked potatoes between Wild Wednesday and the bat workshop but the weather turned at the wrong time, from sunny spells to heavy rain just when we needed to start cooking and I ended up dashing home for an hour instead!

We met up again later on in Matlock Bath for a bit of a training session on bat detectors and bat identification, which was led by Katherine Boughey from the Bat Conservation Trust. We looked at sonograms, repetition, tone, duration and pitch in calls and how to find a bat's peak frequency on the detector plus other bat related knowledge including surveys. After a couple of hours in the classroom we headed out for an hour, walking through the woods and alongside the river.

We found Daubenton's bats, Common Pipistrelles and Sopranao Pipistrelles on our short walk.

As well as the bats, I enjoyed the colourful spiders... The bridge in Matlock Bath has colour changing lights along it and many cobwebs...