Bat Detection Technology And Why It's Flapping Cool - Heather Young

welcome thank you thank you for coming sorry for the tech issues um earlier but yeah this talk is about bats and why they're cool so yeah uh who Am I who is me I am Heather um I've just graduated from the University of Edinburgh with Bachelor um in ecology and environmental Sciences management um I currently work for p forall which is Scotland's walking charity um so they do work encouraging people to walk and get exercise and get out in the environment um all that green energy stuff uh as well and also um this summer I gained a job with David dods where I did seasonal ecology work which is where I gained my passion for bat

surveys and things like that so yeah um so why why bats why bats are they even important so um bats play a vital role in our ecosystems around the world um and provide loads of ecosystem services so animals and plants things like that can do stuff to our environment that basically um improve different functions um within the environment so um bats play a crucial role in some of those as listed on the screen so pollination bats help in the pollination of over 500 plants around the world um key plants like U mangoes and bananas and Agave so um yeah they're pretty important for the food that we eat and um yeah um they also help with speed um seed dispersal

so um if you've got forests that have been deforested um a lot of that um activity will help regrowth the forest which is really important um and also pest control so um lots of BS I think around 70% of them eat um insects so that's good for keeping population control of insects down um and also is a natural pesticide which is really good um because pesticides not only impact bat populations but other wildlife and other functions around farming and things like that so pesticides are shortterm benefit for farming but can also cause um further um detriments down the line so bats are a good natural um solution to that um but they are currently under threat um

most populations have suffered severe declines in the past Century due to of things like habitat loss so the loss of hros around the UK has definitely impacted um UK bat populations along with pesticide use um climate change and disease um yeah so they are pretty important um I would say um so yeah just some fun little facts um all British bats are insector so they all catch um insects um they do that through three main ways so Hawking which is just in the air gleaning which is off vegetation so again um loss of forest is really important for their hunting activities um and also they find their roots in forests as well so um yeah so vegetation

is very really important for them and also gaffing um which is off water which I didn't realize until I was writing this talk which I think is pretty cool term for it um so bats use echolocation um to locate their prey and fly at night um so they basically send out um a call and then they make a mental mind map of a complex picture of the environment to go hunt their prey in um so yeah I'm currently out of a bat job because they're all asleep right now hibernating so I won't have a new job until May when they wake up but yeah so they basically will they sometimes can come out in warmer weather during um cold colder

Seasons but um it's really inconsistent for doing surveys if you're guessing when they're going to come out so we tend not to work during the winter months but in Spring warmer weather means the bats come back again and they gather in low groups so in in the summer the females gather together in what we call maturity roosts so they'll gather together to have their babies which is quite sweet and males go off to their bachelor pad um yep um and then in the Autumn maing season occurs and then um as the weather gets colder again um they'll separate off into little groups and go hibernate again so yeah um legal protection of bats um so

all bats are protected and are classified as European protected species um so disturbing or destroying a bat Roost is a criminal offense without a license granted um so that is uh £5,000 per bats or per incident depending on which is more severe and um can be up to six months in prison so please don't go around knocking down bat RS you don't want to go to prison basically um licenses are only provided if three tests are met so if it's absolutely necessary for the bat safety to be moved if there's um um if it's deemed that this is the only way to get rid of them um and if you set up um mitigation so

often you'll hear people talk about mitigation strategies so they need to fix part of a roof they can mitigate that part that needs fixed so the bats can still live in the other part but aren't Disturbed or get hurt by the work um happening in the other side of the house basically um so yeah if they do need to be totally removed though people will make bat roosts and things like that in the natural environment so they can move to to provide them an extra home um so to also disturb bats or scient for scientific research um is a criminal offense um and um as long as so I personally because I don't hold a

nature Scot bat LIC I can't go and handle a bat and also because I don't have a rabies vaccine um because I don't really want rabies um so I can't do that um I'm part of I believe the licensing is actually going and getting your Rab's vaccine for your own protection um so yeah um but if you do hold that license then you can do things like proper capture of thats if necessary um so yeah um I was going to make you guess but I forgot that part of the talk so there are technically 18 but um Legally Legally um there are 17 and because of that if you see most of these bats are

in alphabetical order um apart from the greater Mouse ear bat down at the right hand bottom side and that's because there's no mating roosts found for many years so if there's no maternal roosts that means they're not breeding within the UK so technically they aren't um they don't have enough survival characteristics and things like that to have a proper population within the UK so there's been the occasional sighting over the past few years but there's no maternal roosts being found um so they don't technically live here which is sad but they're really cute look at that little guy um so I included him um but yeah so these are bats across the UK and um um yeah um so does anyone want to

guess how many bats there are in Scotland which is where I do my surveying so Scotland tends to be a little bit of a colder climate a little bit harsher so there are only 10 species founded in Scotland so please ask me about these bats and not the other bats because I have limited knowledge about the English bats um I'm happy to talk about them like whoa they are bats but my knowledge on them is a little bit um lesser let's say but yeah so these are the bats founded in Scotland um so using my Technologies um that I've um I'll talk about later um I basically monitor of them around um the borders to

um the east side and the west side and up into like perer area we don't really go up into Highlands just because that's a bit far away for getting there and driving and stuff like that but yeah so that's for our survey and yeah so how do I actually do my job so just giving a general overview um on the left hand side um there's a site which was basically an abandoned ruin in someone's back Garden which was really cool they just lived in this really cute little cottage and then they just had a little castle in the back which I thought was pretty neat um but yeah so you can see I've got a tripod set up and to the left

there is a torch and that's an infrared torch and then to the right there's a camera set up and that's an infrared camera and then in the right hand picture that is a bat detector that I'm holding and I'm holding a little clicker um and there's a little wire that goes in and a little ear pierce ear pierce ear pierce and then there was a radio which is really handy but someone's taking the radio so it can't be like this is the radio I use because that's yeah but I also use a radio so that's a general overview of what I need to do B surveys um so so infrared I mentioned infrared a lot in the last survey so um in the last

presentation not survey um so what is infrared um so a British Astron astronomer um discovered it in um um in the 18th century um 17 no 18 never mind um so he got prism helded up to the light and saw that the colors separated and so he thought hm I wonder if there's different temperatures between these so he stuck thermometers under each color and then he had a control um thermometer outside but he noticed that the control thermometer outside um the Spectrum on the red hand side got way hotter than the other ones and he was like oh that's funny and he'd actually discovered infered um radiation which I think is pretty cool um and yeah look at him it's

quite proud he's like I've done something but yeah so infrared radiation um the bottom picture on the left is when it's daytime so that's the view through the camera without any infrared light on it and that is the infrared um on the top left when it's on so you can see there's a much greater visibility between um when it's night time I wouldn't be able to see anything um so it' be really hard to describe bat movements and um where the bats are located and things like that um on a roost so at this particular site I Wander over um we had 80 bats coming out of here we had 50 bats coming out of here

and we had about 30 coming out of here so in Pitch Darkness I wouldn't be able to describe how many bats there were in case because you sometimes get bats flying over you if you've been standing there for a while insects will gather we all know this we've probably been hiking things like that you get loads of insects Gathering so often in a survey it's handy to have cameras to see if there's been little bat that's really really interested in you or if it's loads of that's coming out the roof so it's helpful to describe to the client what's actually going on in their roof as well um but yeah so that's really handy and that's another picture um of

when infrared is off and when infrared is on um the Little Red Dot is when it's recording um but yeah so the left hand side that's um kind of like an abandoned Barn area I think it used to be a stables and what was happening in that picture was I get I was getting old of bat readings on my back detector which we'll talk about in a second and looked at the infrared camera and there was bats circling the barn and we were like what's happening here and so I was speaking to um the lead on the survey and they reckoned that the bats were basically shoehorning insects into a little like shed area and they were

eating them and then flying back around and then Gathering more and pushing them in so it was kind of cool um but that obviously we wouldn't have seen that behavior on without the infrared cameras so that's really cool um yep so bat detectors um that's a lot of information but the general gist of it is that bat detectors are devices that convert ultra sonic bat calls into audible sounds so we'll see in a slide in in a few slides over um that bat calls are way out of human hearing you'll get like a little tiny slice that we can probably hear um but most of them are in our non- hearing range so bat detectors help us um basically um listen

to them so there's a few different types petrine is just a tunable one um which is really good for identifying um some species but because you have to physically tune it yourself you can miss bats if you um if you're going to a new survey site if it's a survey site where you probably know that there's going to be X species you can tune into that frequency um and then get all the bats but if there's non species probably miss them um frequency division is um captured in real time and then the frequency is divided um by 10 when it's recording so this allows continuous detection throughout the night which is really great for getting the overview of

the night but um it makes a l detailed um sound analysis um when you're converting it into spectrograms and things like that um because of that division Factor um zero Crossing is again um recording but it makes into a l plot with low data points which I think is cool um and it creates really small files so you can have this sitting in the field um so if it's a really remote spot you can place the little back detector out and then you can come back every five to six days and collect it and it means you not don't have to stand out in a really remote um Highland Mur for ages hoping for bats and then

there's none um but yeah again the spectrograms are less detailed um comparatively to um a full spectrum or a time um expansion one so time expansion is a short sample of the sound and then it gets played back so you can really hear the audio um which is great for recording in high detail to look at the call structure and things like that um it's really good for getting a lot of educational sounds so when you're first um learning about back calls you'll normally use time expansion calls because it breaks down you can very easily see like different shapes that the different back calls make um but unfortunately these detectors can't detect back calls and also do that slow

down process at the same time so if you're using out in the field if you're slowing down a back call you might miss another back call so you don't get a full um image of what's actually out in the field and finally a full spectrum um record sounds in real time at their original frequency so it's the best of Both Worlds or that worlds um so you can use the frequency division um which um allows you to see what the sounds are um but it also holds that recording like the time expansion one so it's very good um at um collecting sounds and then you can also visually see so you can store it and also see it um but this um takes

a lot of high sampling really detailed um uh files so yeah it battery and SD card gets used up really quickly but as you can see the hetr is probably the cheapest because it's got the less functionality whereas as you go down the list the more functionaly the more expensive it is um they are really expensive um luckily no one's broken one yet because yeah that would be um probably about 1,000 pounds that I'm holding there every single night um but yeah so that's what it looks like as you can see it lights up um at night so I can really easily see what's happening um and then that's why we've got the ear pierced because if it's connected in so

it'll um change the um Sonic sound into audible hearing for us so that's why we hear it because we can hear it and then um different bats have different um ranges of calls so we can hear it and be like that sounds like a pist but I don't know which one and then I would look down at my recorder and it would be 22 Herz that's probably going to be way out the range um so but um yeah and I'll be like that's probably a common and I'll be able to radio over spoiling the rest of the talk but I'll be able to radio over to my boss being like High I've just had a common pil come out with the

roost and that'd be really handy for her and she' be able to write a not of it but yeah um yes so that's the frequency calls I've been talking about um so yeah this is another reason why it's nice being in Scotland comparatively to England um don't read into that too much but um um because we've got less species there's way less overlap and we can tell um the differences between the species quite easily um so if you look at the Pips at the top um um top three species their Peak frequency ranges are very like quite separated so as I was saying you can identify it from the sound of it being um like a hand clap and Jazzy

regular rhythm which probably doesn't make any sense unless you actually hear the sound and you're like of course it is it is a hand clap sound or a chip chop or whatever um but then having that back detector in front of you um is really good for being able to tell the peak frequencies quite easily um and it helps yeah um but as you um as you can see the bottom three species are all myota species um and their Peak frequency range is quite similar and they also quite they sound quite similar but because um these species have different habitat environments and also environmental impact um conditions that they like to live in um that's why we

take those measurements during the field as well because we can be like there's Forest it's probably the species comparative to the species that hunts only on water so it's probably not in the middle of a forest um and things like that yep so that's just to show you the differences between the calls as you can see um this amount of activity is quite unusual at a sight but I quite like this diagram to show um the variety of calls that you can get um so you can see that the commons uh the common and the soprano are in a higher frequency range than also the nol and the other myot species and have um very kindly put the

limit of human hearing on there so you can see that we could probably catch the end of calls but not a lot of the um top ranges and we could completely Miss other species if we were just standing about listening for PS which is not very scientific at all but um yeah uh radios we kind of had a demonstration of how a radio worked before I put in some jokes throughout the latter half of the presentation to keep the motivation up um but yeah radios they're really handy from um the site so they obviously not obviously but they use radio waves to communicate um so they change the radio waves into um electronic signals that we can now um

hear as audio so it's really useful as say as I explained kind of earlier we'll have a lead on the bat survey so um a non-lead such as myself will be stood somewhere staring at the building for two hours not moving just looking for bats um but then the um lead of the bat survey will walk around us and then if one of us calls with the radio hi I've had a soprano pip come out the roost um they'll come over and we'll be able to describe exactly where it was and they can note it down instead of um they used to have a system of you would have to note down where it was in the dark while

also staring and also managing your radio and it was a whole system but um yeah the radios make it a lot easier it also provides a lot of safety on site we can be in areas where there's hikers or people come up um so it's really good to have that um connection to the rest of the team even if you are in the dark by yourself um so you know that they're just there but yeah um that's the radio uh and some honorable mentions is the torch um I mentioned earlier and also the air pierces um so I mentioned that we have infrared um torches on top of the um tripod as well and that just

gives us some extra radiation basically to see more clearly in case it's a really dark night or it's quite cloudy or something or there's not great visibility it's good to just have that extra point especially because the camera will be focusing on One Direction but can capture um the rest of the field division so if you've got something happening on the left then you can Shine the torch to the left and that will break it up a little bit for the camera and the cre but yeah um yep so just a little bit about if you wanted to get involved um so conservation and nature um B conservation trust they do a lot of work

a lot of it is free I know that it says become a member and also donate on ways to help on the slide but um there's loads of free resources such as when I was looking um researching for this uh bat talk they've got batfest during this October um so there's loads of free um events encouraging um young people but also um all people of all ages to get involved with bats surveying and um I would say 95% of the talks are free and they're an hour um there's loads of things from like different um the their food that they eat the different behaviors they've got some talks about bats that aren't in the UK which I think

is really interesting and great to have a knowledge of different bats um but yeah there's also bat lib which I discovered a few months ago which is basically like European bat calls um and it's really good just for hearing what B different bats sound like as well and also um because I mentioned back in the few slides ago that um you shouldn't really be handling bats um I would recommend the national bat help line which I think is a good resource to have but also if you wanted to get in contact with your local bat group they'll have a number of someone that can look after the bats if you ever find a little bat

not doing too well but yeah um yeah I didn't really know what to put for the last slide um so come talk to me if you wanted I didn't know if I would have questions or not um I was supposed to have a little script but I've kind of ignored that um but yeah so I didn't know how much time I would have um so um I'm happy to answer questions now or afterwards or you can contact me if you get anxious been quite anxious during stock but yeah um that's the end of the talk thank you for coming I really appreciate it and yeah have a great peid [Applause]

yeah can I ask a question what we do get a lot of BS and what do I do when they get into the house um so I've had them fly in through the window um so um I would just keep an like an idea of where they are um if they're in a room that you can block off I can understand if they fly into your bedro it's kind of an awkward situation but in like a kitchen or a living room or something try to just block them off and um hopefully they'll come out where they went in um but um like I was saying um there should be um the bat conservation trust has

loads of local bat groups so you can always phone their number and also the national helpl line they'll be able to give you some good advice as well but um bat um once they get in a house hopefully we'll leave but I can understand that um it's a little bit stressful when you're like ah there's a bat inside my home um but yes I'd recommend calling the national bat help line and just kind of closing the door and let everyone do their thing because they're probably as stressed out as you are because they're like I'm in I'm in a house now I don't know what to do um type thing um but yeah they're not yeah

same thing with spiders they're probably equally as scared as you as you are as it so um just try to give it some space that's my recommendation yeah yeah we get plenty of bats flying flying around in the garden in the evenings you know spring summer evenings um how do you how do we encourage them make their habitat better oh that's a really good question I should have mentioned that on the past slide but um actually go back um the bat conservation trust I didn't look into it too much because I didn't know if there would be a question on it but um if you Google gardening for bats um within the bat conservation trust they've got a

whole um article about how to make your garden more friendly for bats I think there's a lot of encouraging um bat um plants so bees not obviously but bees look for like bright colored plants but at night um the don't really see that color so they'll pollinate different plants um that the bees might miss so it's probably planting more bat friendly plants if that makes sense um but yeah I definitely recommend going onto the bat conservation trust and they um they've got definitely an article I saw it while researching this um but yeah I think it's called gardening for bat friendly Garden or something or bat friendly Gardens or something but yeah they've got some resources on it as

well any questions great [Applause]