Re: [Maine-birds] Re: Bats

To follow up on Logan's message.  In July I was an instructor on Hog Island and a camper had a small bat detector that fit on the end of her iPad and she detected 5 species of bat the first night!: Hoary, Silver-haired, Eastern Red, Big and Little Browns.  I was astonished.

Once home I purchased the same detector from Wildlife Acoustics:

http://wildlifeacoustics.com/products/echo-meter-touch

You can go on line to learn particulars but this small receiver fits on the end of an iPhone and I place the unit on our open window sill at dusk.  The software transposes the sounds so that humans can easily hear the clicks.  The software identifies the bats to species and one can record and thus archive the sounds.  In Richmond, we regularly get Big Brown, Silver-haired and Eastern Red, and Little Brown once.  Last night I watched and heard the Big Brown simultaneously.

My wife and I were in Lubec this past weekend and I recorded Hoary, Silver-haired and Big Brown.  Who knew Silver-haired was as common as this?

The recordings are geo-referenced so the precise locality is recorded as well.

It's truly an amazing device and it's been great learning the transposed bat sounds.  Last night we audio identified Big Brown as we were eating dinner.  The "rocks" sound like Japanese wooden sticks knocked together.

The unit costs $400. which isn't cheap but frankly, isn't expensive.  If you want to learn much more about bats, this is a great way to go.

The information collected on these simple devices will be enormously valuable to future efforts to better understand bat distributions. I plan to be recording every time I go somewhere new for the evening.  Dinner with the Jone's?, take along the bat detector!

Best,

Peter

On Sep 2, 2015, at 10:58 AM, Logan Parker <lparker.mainelakes@gmail.com> wrote:

I posted this on another board, but thought I'd include it here as well. I have had a fair amount of success recording bats in the Belgrade Lakes region and even picked up recordings of Little brown bat on Great Meadow Stream. There are likely many fewer bats in the area than in years past, but they are still out there if you know when/where to look. We've got to be vigilant about researching and protecting bat species if we want to prevent further population declines. 

I've been really interested in bats/bat conservation for the last several years and have had the pleasure of working on a few projects in which I surveyed bats with acoustic detectors. With NABat, I installed stationary detectors in various locations in the Casco/Naples area and drove transects with a detector affixed to my car. While the data collected in these sorts of projects is no doubt valuable, its collection is not something many citizens would be will take on. This year, however, I started working on a project in partnership with UMaine, Maine IFW, and Maine Audubon that aims to study bats through a citizen science network. I think it shows real promise. 

In this project (BatME), citizen scientists around the state would be supplied with detectors compatible with iOS devices. With these user-friendly detectors in hand, the citizen will have to power to conduct surveys whenever (at sunset) and wherever they wish. Best of all, the associated application has a live feed spectrogram, lowers the echolocating calls of bats to an audible frequency, and has fairly accurate identification software. The calls are recorded and GPS coordinates logged. I've conducted more than a dozen surveys with this detector in various habitat and recorded the calls of six (out of eight) of Maine bat species. Included in these recordings were the echolocating calls of the recently state-listed endangered Little brown bat. I've been really impressed with the detector and have high hopes for the project. We're certainly primed to gain a lot of data on our local bat populations and distributions. We will be working on the logistics of a statewide monitoring project later this year. 

In the meantime, MPBN covered the project last month. I took reporter Susan Sharon out to seek out bats at Mt Apatite in Auburn. We were not disappointed. Click the link below to read the article or give it a listen:

http://news.mpbn.net/post/volunteers-count-bats-maine-effort-save-them

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