You get to play with some electronic kit which can pick up bats’ squeaks when pointed where they are flying, and bring them down in pitch a few octaves, so they be heard. Comes out as some distinctive clicks. When you hear them, you should be able to look up and see the bats themselves.
Not a lot of people know this, but different species of bat squeak at different frequencies, and it’s only recently that, thanks to this, experts realised there were more than one species of pipistrelle bat flying around our night skies.
We had someone doing a sound recording over a whole week at Dacres Wood Nature reserve, thanks to which we know that we have there three different species of pipistrelle - common (45 and 76 kHz), soprano (53 and 86 kHz) and Nathusius’s (36–62 kHz)
That’s amazing! It seems a shame to call one of them ‘common’ when the other two have much cooler names, though.
To give you an idea of how ultrasonic those frequencies are, this YouTube page does a ‘sweep’ from 1Hz to 40kHz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_r2bXX3gbY You might want to put the dog outside before you play it.
