The Lyons Share

I've been to a training day at the Natural History Museum today organised by the Bat Conservation Trust looking at analysing bat recordings from woodland transects that I helped carry out last summer at The Mens and Ebernoe Common. It was really interesting and my physics degree came in handy for the first time in a while! I learned a lot, it was great to see and hear the different calls the bats make and how to describe and identify them. Particular emphasis was put on Barbastelle Bats and that is what is shown on the above photo. It has two calls at different frequencies and of different shapes. You can't identify all bats this way, the Myotis species for example cannot really be differentiated by call. A long day with a lot crammed into it but I have learned more abouts today than I have probably in the rest of my life put together. An invaluable day and I am looking forward to helping with the surveys (and now the sound analysis) this year on our sites. I had no time to look around the museum and all I managed to get a photo of was of this was this pasty looking fellow waiting for a bus.