Experiments

DETECTING BATS FROM AFAR

In 2022, Simon Robson was commissioned to develop and test systems for remotely monitoring bats. Any apparatus should be sufficiently robust to store several months of visual and audio data, and to operate under the temperature, light and rainfall extremes of Queensland torrid zones.

The aims are to identify known species and their activity patterns, detect unknown species, and to provide size estimates of populations at maternity sites.

The project requires not just assembling and field-testing equipment but creating a public-access bat-call library. Ground-truthing of the library requires trapping bats and releasing them in a manner that specific calls can be ascribed to a species. Simon aimed to create the library from our own data plus from data collected by others.

Simon needed an off-sider and travelling companion…I was one of those chosen.

Our collaboration had an inauspicious beginning. At our first site, beneath Killymoon Bridge on the Bruce Highway about xx km south of Townsville, we didn’t catch any bats…but we saw some! …and we found a petrol station that cooked us FRESH Chiko Rolls!!! Simon was unaware that Chiko Rolls were classed as food if they had not been in a tepid warming-oven for less than 3 days.

We have undertaken a number of expeditions (see ‘Boogie at Boojamulla‘, ‘A sojourn at Blackbraes‘, ‘Carnarvon Station‘, ‘Bat hunting in the NT‘).