Bats in the Park

Yesterday evening, Crafty Green Boyfriend, his brother and their mother joined over 100 other people in Harrison Park for a bat walk! Luckily the weather was lovely, a warm evening with not too much wind.

Organised by Edinburgh and Lothians Greenspace Trust, the evening started with a talk about bats from Graeme Wilson from The Wildlife Information Centre. As dusk deepened, the bat detectors were handed out and we wandered round the park to find bats!

There were actually quite a few bats around, mostly soprano pipistrelles, but they were impossible to catch on camera as they're so small and move so fast!

So we quickly gave up on the photos and just enjoyed watching the bats flying round between  the trees and listening to them via the bat detectors. A bat detector makes bats' high pitched echolocation calls audible to humans - and because different bat species hunt different prey and are different sizes, they make different calls which can help identify them.

It was great to see so many children enjoying the event, some of them had dressed up as batman or batwoman or were wearing bat masks. Some of them also knew quite a lot about bats, as they demonstrated during Graeme's interactive talk!