Whiskered bats

Still processing the photos from the Top Hill Low batbox check. We found a couple of whiskered bats, which were a challenge to photograph as they are notoriously wiggly and vicious, but I did get some pictures of the tragus and 'gentleman's part' which are identification features.

And those of a more delicate constitution, look away now...

Film Photography

Nice article on film photography and the Lomo cameras on the BBC website today. I know a lot of photographers who still prefer to use film when they can, it's a totally different process and feel to digital photography. They both have their place in my opinion.

Bats and Biomimetics on television

Tonight on BBC1 at 9pm, I'll be on television with Richard Hammond as part of his 'Miracles of Nature' series looking at Biomimetics, how nature and evolution have inspired engineers. This was filmed in some caves in Bristol where we looked at how echolocating Egyptian fruit-bats can avoid obstacles and how this has inspired technology to help the blind. The work on these bat's echolocation call structures, and the technology we developed to record echolocation went into the 'ultracane' which is a guideance device for the visually impaired. There is some fantastic footage in high-speed infra-red of the bats obviously detecting the wires and pulling in their wings at the last moment. There is also some amazing footage of a blind mountain cyclist using the ultracane technology to steer himself down a forest track.

The footage we shot of the bats actually took about two days, not including the extra two days it took Hannah Sneyd, the researcher for the programme, to bat-proof the caves which are old sandstone mines for the Bristol glass industry and which run under Britstol docks.

We actually filmed two alternative versions, one with Richard Hammond for the BBC and a version without Richard for German TV and the international satellite market. This latter version features some amazing footage using an 'acoustic camera' that superimposes the location of a sound onto a video feed.

For the next six months I'll be working on an Ecosystems Services Transfer Toolkit at the University of York with Prof. Piran White in the Envrionment Department, and funded by Natural England. The tool will be a piece of software which will allow land managers to select from a range of habitat types and management interventions and see instantly which ecosystem services will be affected by that intervention, and whether the effects will be positive or negative. This will then link through to the evidence base for that interaction. The habitats we'll be looking at initially will be uplands, lowland freshwater, lowland agriculture and urban. The first challenge will be to find a structure for the database that is simple but allows for expansion in the future should new query structures arise.

Nathusius' pipistrelles

I was lucky enough to be invited out with the East Yorkshire bat group on their bat box check at Top Hill Low, which is a Yorkshire Water nature reserve. The promise was lots of Nathusius' pipistrelles, and it didn't disappoint with one in the first box we checked, though that one was a bit lively and made good its escape. The movement of very active bats from one box to the next made it difficult to tell just how many there were, as they are not ringed, but somewhere in the region of about seven seemed a decent guess. This has to make this reserve on of the UK hotspots for this species now.

We were joined by Tina Wiffen and others from the Northumberland Nathusius bat project, who we equally delighted with the chance to see and handle so many Nathusius pipistrelles.

I was especially interested in the wing fibre markings as this is supposed to be one way of separating these bats from the other UK pipistrelles, though for all the bats we saw, their size, robust appearance and hairy tail membranes made then pretty obvious.

Have just returned from the annual BCT conference in York. Lots of good talks on offer, as well as lots of interesting trade stands with the latest technology. The Wildlife Acoustics EM3 was popular, giving hand-held outputs of sonograms in the field.

The most interesting talk from my perspective was from Charlotte Walters from the Institute of Zoology who was talking about the results from the iBats project. Charlotte used an ensemble neural network approach (eANN) to try to identify species within the iBats database using parameters extracted from analysis in Sonobat. She managed to get an overall correct classification rate of just over 80% which is comparable to other studies and seems to be about as good as it gets. Myotis as ever were a problem, with Natterer's proving the easiest to identify, with most of the other UK Myotis falling back to about 50% correct classification. The full paper can be found here.

Right, I've now given up with NiMH batteries, you think you've got a good charged set, and then you look away and they've faded. Having got fed up with checking the D500x and finding out that it recorded only two nights out of the four as the batteries died, I've gone back to environmentally unfriendly alkalines. Having done that, I've managed to get seven nights of recording from one set of four batteries (3 second files at 500 kHz) of 2500 files and still had the batteries at 4.7 V, so probably fine for another night or two. I've got an external battery box that will take four C cells, so I would imagine that with good quality alkalines in those I should get up to two weeks recording. I shall check that when we get to August.