Went out newt hunting with Richard Roe, one of my ex students who now runs Kingdom Ecology. We looked at a development site in Cheshire with four ponds to do and set bottle traps at all of them. The morning revealed a good haul of great crested newts as well as a lot of smooth newts, nine in one bottle trap. Torching at night was interesting as we found a fair number of great crested newts that were very light, almost an olive colour which made separation from smooth newts something of a challenge when seen briefly.

I've been looking into getting a remote monitoring system for bat echolocation. I ruled out the EcoObs batcorder due to cost, so it was between the Wildlife Acoustics SM2+ and the Pettersson D500x. It was not an easy decision, but after weighing up cost, recording quality, expandability and integration into Batsound I went with the D500x. This is to deploy at a couple of sites this summer to be used in conjunction with transects so it's likely to be out in the field for a few months. Needless to say, I'll be testing it in the garden first, let's see if I can get further than the usual species list of P. pipistrellus.

Just got back from running a two day course on sound analysis in the New Forest. It was a good opportunity to review the literature on automated logging of bat passes and automatic recognition of bat calls. There are some very interesting statistical techniques being used, but I have to say, not with a great deal of success, mostly with separating some Myotis species and especially with the separation of serotine from Leisler's. There is also considerable confusion between Plecotus and Barbastellus. Close but no cigar.

Ran the BCT 'Bat Ecology and Conservation' introductory course yesterday at Juniper Hall near Dorking.Went very well, I may alter a little bit of it to include some more of the recent findings around bat phylogeny and the fossil record. We had a fantastic display of live bats courtesy of Jenny Clarke from the Sussex bat hospital, with serotines, Leisler's, Natterer's and all three UK pipistrelles in the same hand (see below) left to right: Soprano, Common and Nathusius'.

The new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) was published yesterday. It is not immediately clear who this will affect bat conservation as there is essentially no guidance given (one of the reasons is it now so short). One of the helpful pieces of guidance, PPS9, is now obsolete. It seems that decisions about the maintenance of local biodiversity has been devolved down to the local planning authority who will have to make it up as they go along. This is alarming as many LPAs do not have in-house expertise on biodivesity issues. None of this affects any exisitng legislation protecting bat roosts, but there has always been a grey area about development and mitigation around very small and infrequently used roosts which leaves planners, consultants and the statutory nature conservation organisations somewhat in limbo.
The IEEM have published a response to  the DRAFT NPPF here.

Just back from two days filming in Bristol. As part of a series of programmes on biomimetics, we recreated an experiment we did a few years ago ago looking at how good Egyptian fruitbats Rousettus aegyptiacus were at avoiding obstacles. It should be called 'The Genius of Nature' and will be presented by Richard Hammond in the Autumn. We used a very exciting acoustic camera that records the location of sound emission from the bats and superimposes it onto the video feed. We also managed to get some fantastic high speed infra-red footage of the bats flying through obstancles. The picture below is of the executive Steve Nicholls getting up close and personal to one of the fruitbats (Barry) who was having a bit of a rest. Thanks to Hannah Sneyd, researcher and former project student of mine for the picture.

Off to Bristol tomorrow for two days filming with Oxford Scientific Films to try to recreate an experiment I did some years ago using Rousettus aegyptiacus fruit-bats using their click echolocaion to avoid obstacles.