I have been away from home intermittently over the last few days, but was home in daylight tonight.It was a close thing though as the sun was just setting.
I decided to make a cup of tea and look to see if the pipistrelle bat would make an appearance.
Sure enough, just after sunset, the little bat appeared and began its swooping and weaving flight around the garden.
I've come to regard it as 'our garden's bat' because it does pretty much stay within the perimeter.
I have previously tried to capture it with a camera, but it is way too fast for that, unless I were to set up some kind of flash rig.
Some people are terrified of bats, but I find the swooping aerial ballet performance as it hunts for insects quite magical.
It seems fairly unruffled by my presence and I can stand outside watching it perform at not much more than arms length and occasionally see it do an extra spiral around me as it takes more of a sounding.
What is less apparent is that the bat is firing out bleeps of very high frequency sound to check for insects using a sort of echo-location. The sounds are actually extremely loud but too high for us to hear except for an occasional click like fingers being snapped.
...and we are not even in the Halloween month yet.
5 comments:
I haven't seen any bats about recently, but we used to have one that would fly in circles around our garden. I think they hang out (literally!) at the village church.
How wonderful, to have your own Garden/House Bat. Is there some Night Blooming Flower in your Garden? They are very attracted to these Night Blooming Cereus....Or, maybe he just likes you all...lol!
Just so long as they don't come in the house.
In South Africa I found a mommy bat giving pained birth to a baby bat in broad daylight. I feared something was going dreadfully wrong, but didn't know what to do to help nature along. So I decided to let nature do her own thing, and I made a water colour of it called 'Bat Baby'.
Nikki-ann : I think that circle thing is what they do when hunting for insects.
Naomi: We certainly have some bloomin' flowers but I'm not sure about night-time ones. Actually all the plants have gone a bit crazy this year because of the double summer in England.
Pat: or the belfry!
Ellie : Whoa - quite a story. I was going to ask about the picture but I suppose its really a private moment.
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