In which I go on a bat walk

I went on a bat-walk this week. It's the way Batman gets round when the bat-mobile and the bat-bike are in the bat-garage. Boom. That's the kind of joke my husband and I made all the way there, and all night long...

In truth it is a night-time ramble at which bats are present. We had these fascinating little devices called bat-detectors which pick up the frequencies of the bats passing by. Every bat makes a different sound, but they are not perceivable to the human ear. This machine picks up the clicking slapping sounds they make in order to form an echo-location picture (we like to call this a bat-signal. Another Batman joke!). In a group you can hear the clicks build up faintly from one end to another as a bat whizzes over head. We actually saw a lot, but mostly pipistrelles. There were other bats around but they move so incredibly fast that it was often more of a black smear passing by.

We did this at the London Wetland Centre and they do them every Thursday so I would seriously recommend it. There's a talk on bats first, followed by a lovely post-sunset early evening walk around lakes with a guide and the use of bat-detectors. It's also rather romantic if you are looking for an unusual date. I would quite like to go to the London Wetland Centre again some time when it is day time and explore the whole thing. We did however have a little bat-picnic before our bat-walk. I am sorry that I don't actually have any pictures of bats from the evening. I would have had to have brought a tripod and have some incredible skills to capture the kind of photos I was imagining. I do have a few pictures of the area and my outfit as the sun was setting though.

 One of the things that was great about the light was getting to experiment with it. We tried taking photos from every angle and position against the sun to see which kind of lighting worked best. It's not the most exciting outfit ever, but it was too beautiful not to play with the camera.

 

This poor man was being so carefully still in observing the swans that he froze completely in place.