You are welcome to join us for the spring Microbats survey after a few months of no activity over winter. We meet at the Barbecue area near the toilets and the entrance to the Park on Todd Road at 5pm Sat 19th October.
If you are new to microbat monitoring, let us know you are coming here. Bring a warm jacket, torch, enclosed shoes/boots; wear mossie repellent. Snacks/drinks if required.
This time we will be meeting to check on bat boxes and at dusk hopefully to observe microbats flying out of their roosts and to record their echo-location calls as they forage for prey. Their calls are outside human hearing range so we will use echo meters to produce a spectrogram or chart which can help identify which microbats are present.
Just over a year ago Andrea and the team at Westgate Biodiversity: Bili Nursery & Landcare started our Citizen Science Microbat project by initiating a “Hollows for Habitat” programme of bat boxes and birds at Westgate Park to aid microbats and birds to find a roost or safe place to breed in the absence of hollows which would normally be found in old trees (often 100 years old or more).
Here’s what the Gould’s Wattled Bat echo-locating call looks like on a spectogram:
Here’s a recap of our activity and a refresher for those of you who haven’t been before:
Here is the Manual for the project we have at Westgate Park. Here is the map of the box sites.
Our last survey was June 23 and our single male Gould’s Wattled bat was still in residence.
We’re hoping to find a brooding box or additional microbats using the boxes this year.
Echolocators have so far only picked up Gould’s Wattled bats with any certainty, with plenty of microbat bat sightings over the freshwater lake at dusk so we’re hoping to expand on that this summer.