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| Image: Probable whiskered bat spectrogram. |
The first night of June brought a new species of bat to the garden in the form of a myotis sp., one of the mouse-eared bats. Exactly which species is a little more difficult to say. Opinion seems to be divided between whiskered and Brandt's, but Daubenton's cannot be completely ruled out either. However, Brandt's seems pretty uncommon in the Greater Manchester area, whereas whiskered does occur. Daubenton's is likely to be at Pennington Flash which is a mile away but it is a species which feeds over water so although there will no doubt be ponds in some of the gardens in the area, it is perhaps less likely over a housing estate, especially when there is such ideal feeding over the flash. So for now I'm going with whiskered. Also last night the detector recorded common pipistrelle on 30 occasions, noctule once and soprano pipistrelle three times. So with the myotis sp. that's four species of bat over the garden last night, not bad.
Summary of bats recorded in May
I had the bat detector out in the garden for 19 nights in May. I just leave it running in the garden and watch the bats through the French doors. The detector has recorded bats on a total of 374 occasions, which can be broken down to: Common pipistrelle 271, noctule 78 and soprano pipistrelle 15. It's also recorded Nathusius' pipistrelle on 9 occasions and Leisler's once, though I'm not yet convinced by either of these two species. I've no way of knowing how many individual bats are involved, all I can say is that a common pipistrelle has flown past the detector on 271 occasions, but it might be the same bat every time.
One other mammal was recorded last night when I finally caught up with the hedgehog which has been leaving it's droppings on the lawn for a month.
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