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.

D500x settings

When setting up the D500x, the settings that might cause some confusion are the gain, trigger level, interval and trigger sensitivity. The gain is how much the signal is amplified, so set it low if the bats are near and loud, or high if they're far and quiet. The trigger level is level at which the signal will trigger the device. The interval is the time between recordings in seconds  - this is to avoid recording the same bat over and over again (unless you want to of course). The one that's got me scratching my head is the tigger sensitivity, which seems to be how long the signal has to remain over the trigger level to start the device. The options are very high, high, medium, low and very low. I guess the idea is to have a setting that will not tigger the device over short signals, rain perhaps.
When setting it up, the device gives a handy indication of when it will be triggered, so you can jangle keys or loose change and make sure it will trigger but that it's also not going all the time.
For the purposes of testing it in my garden, I've got gain and tigger level set to 30, interval at 0 and tigger sensitivity at low.

D500x - it's arrived

After a slightly delayed trip from Sweden via several courier depots and my neighbour, my D500x has arrived. First impressions are that it's small and well built. The menu is quite user friendly, and it's pretty easy to set up. Unlike the older versions with the previous firmwear, this one just needs Windows FAT32 formatted CF cards in it, not the specially formatted ones that the D1000x needs.
As the device is not totally weatherproof, and looks rather high-tech and appealing dangling from a tree, I set about maiking an enclosure to keep the weather off, and make it more discrete.
I started off with an plastic electronics enclosure box and cut a hole for the microphone. I then used that cut-off section as a shield above the microphone. The external power lead annoyingly comes out the front of the device which means you have to bend the lead back in to the battery pack.
For batteries I made a pack up from a 6xAA holder I got from Maplins. That should give about 7.2 V at 2500 mAH. The device only needs about 4 V to work, but six batteries should give some margin if a battery or two fails, which seems to be quite common for NiMH batteries, for me anyway.

The D500x with a 6 AA battery pack wired into the external power socket.

Packed inside the box, the external power cable has to come out and then be net back around again.

All done up inside the box and sprayed a nice drab olive colour.

The microphone is shielded from rain by the cut-out section which has been bolted to the lid.

Deployed for testing in my garden.

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.