Bats!

This evening we went for a bat walk with Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust.  It's something that I have been really keen to do and it's only this year really that we've been able to consider doing it in terms of the time of evening that it has to happen.  We spotted a few bat walks in the leaflet of events that we received with our news letter and were disappointed that the one closest to us was already booked up when I phoned, but one a bit further away still had spaces.  We met at Sellers Wood at 7.15pm (well a few minutes late because the traffic was bad, but not too late fortunately!) and we given one of the bat detectors that the walk leaders had brought with them.  It picks up the bats' calls, which are at too high a frequency for us to hear (fortunately as we learned that some species calls reach up to 120 decibels, which is much higher than would be allowed in a nightclub!).  The detectors, as well as letting us know that there were bats about, also give information about which species or family of bat were around as the frequency of different bat calls varies.  We only heard and saw one species, the most common bat in the UK, the common pipistrelle bat but as one of the leaders of the walk said, we did get some really good sightings and sometimes they may pick up the calls of various species but not really see any of them well. 

As well as getting so hear and see bats, we also learned rather a lot.  For example, it's now mating season for bats, but although they mate in autumn, the females don't ovulate until spring, but store the sperm until then in order to get an early start on raising their young!  If they come out of hibernation and get pregnant but then if it gets colder and they go back into hibernation the pregnancy comes to a stop and only progresses once they come out of hibernation again.  Fascinating!  We're planning on looking up some more about bats tomorrow, one of the leaders was the chairman of the Nottinghamshire Bat Group and suggested we look at their website.

In other news, having finished The Silver Sword, it was time to choose another book to move onto, so today we started Heidi.  K & M (mostly M because K was doing a sudoku on the tablet) built dens in the front room and listened from in there.

The dens

K & M have also both been playing Thingdom today and we've talked a little bit about dominant and recessive genes.

Finally, A, who lives across the road and occasionally childsits for us, and her mum popped over for a chat.  A's history teacher and tutor has suggested that she run for the UK Youth Parliament and she wanted to talk to someone with an 'alternative' view of the education system, which was interesting.