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Bat Walk - 25th July 2011 - By Wendy Barlow

On 25th July the Friends ran a Bat walk for some 40 odd (very odd if you think of us tripping around the wood in the gloaming!)  People.

Luckily we had the expert Steve Trotter from Warwickshire Wildlife Trust with us so we weren’t completely in the dark.

We started at 8.30 p.m. and luckily the rain held off -apparently bats are no fonder of rain than we are and tend not to fly in the wet. Steve talked us through some amazing bat facts and identified a number of possible bats we might hear. He also introduced us to the incredible machines that pick up the bat cries and explained how each bat seems to communicate at a different frequency. The children in the group were by now thoroughly absorbed as indeed were the adults, so at 9 o‘clock when we heard our first Pipistrelles everyone was listening intently with the occasional ‘ooh’,  ‘aah’ and ‘there’s one’.

We started the evening close to the crematorium where Steve showed us where Long eared bats left bits of the moths they had been crunching. We also heard the sounds of Noctule bats and spotted them in the darkening sky swooping like birds.

We continued our walk through the darkening woods which in itself is quite an adventure! With torches flashing and great enthusiasm we identified some different bats and saw a glow worm!

I had the feeling that had Shakespeare been with us he would have picked up the excitement that even the adults had on this wood walk in the dark on a night close to Midsummer.A Dream indeed.

Join us on our next woodland adventure.