Special holidays...

I'm going to talk about bats, nature conservation and environment studies...people not interested, follow your way, sorry it's not art (we can discuss about that )

Ok few reminders before starting : bats are mammals, they have babies they breast-feed, they only eat insects here in ancient Europe, they hibernate on winter and females gather in colony in summer to have babies in specific roosts...ok?   (if it's not a revision, it's ok too and if you have questions, please ask  )

As I said in my status update last weeks, I was in holidays...but not totally, to be honest, I wasn't working indeed, but I'm volunteer in a bat protection NGO since 2002... This year, for second time, we studied a bats colony roosting near my home and I attend (?) for 12 years...It's Bechstein's bats (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechstei…) a very rare bat, here in South of France. They are forest bats, leaving and roosting in trees most of the time, hunting in woodlands. It's only female bats, here to give birth to their only one baby a year.

At first time, we found them in a little church in a forest, and as they were disapearing sometimes, we known that there was another roost somewhere...but as they are flying very high in branches of trees, it's quite impossible to see them, we can't use bat detectors too, cause the sonar of this species is too weak to be detected from ground level...so in 2015, we put little transmitters on their back to find where was the others roosts. We only found one big tree, a plane tree, with an hole at 15m high, where 80 bats are living. The church wasn't the main roost, only a satellite, where only a tiny part of the population was giving birth. The church, the plane tree, the forest where they are living is a natural protected area owned by Bouches-du-Rhône administration. It's a rare place in south of France, with a little river with continuous water and deciduous bigs trees.

These bats are known to use a lot of trees...so we wanted to find others roosts...so we did it again. The protocol is always the same : 10 transmitters, 10 days of work, first, capturing 5 bats (easy to say  ) and put little transmitters on the back of the bats : the transmitters are tiny ones, only 0,4g, heaviest are only 0,8g and you can't put a transmitter if it weights more than 10% of the bat's weight. An adult Bechstein's bat weights between 10-12g. The transmitters are sticked between their shoulders with fake eyelashes glue, a harmless and degradable one (transmitters fall down on their own after few days). The transmitters are like little rice grain, with a little antenna.  On the fourth, fifth day, we trap bats again, to have new bats to follow.

The aims of this kind of studies are numerous :
- of course, find new roost places if they are existing, or roost places when we don't know where they are,
- understand where bats are going to hunt and feed each night, bats always go to the same place for hunting (mainly, they can change if there is a lot of wind or rain) , so we can try to understand which kind of natural environment they are selecting and so, try to protect it or further it,
- understand which kind of flying routes they are using (some bat species use flying routes, others don't).

So, each night, after our bats are geared with transmitters, we take position on high places to try to see where bats are flying, at first time from far range, and then, trying to find out where they are : each team has an antenna and a receptor, and give the direction of the signal they receive (the direction is given in degrees with a compass) and you have to cross the directions of 2 or 3 teams to determine where the bat is ! easy, isn't it ??   yeah, to write

When you lost a bat, you have to follow the last direction you had, and try to find out where she's gone. Day by day, you make a lot of points by crossing directions and then, with a specific software, you can analyse and map the hunting territories of bats.

Of course, you have to deal with failing equipment issues this year, we had very very bad quality transmitters...on 10 equipments, 3 never starts when we activate them...one geared on a bat stopped immediatly after we release the bat...a bat bites one of the antenna, the transmitter only works from a short range...and most of the transmitters only last 3 days, sometimes we had time to determine where bats were going but we had no time to refine datas (the more we have points, the more it's easy to analyse...)...bad bad quality    

What had we learnt this year, after all these nights without sleeping ???

- we confirm that bat's babies only hunt near the plane tree where they were born, and at the beginning, their mothers stay a long part of the night with them to teach them how to hunt. The natural environment around the plane tree is a very typical one for the species, with a lot of deciduous trees and all stata in the forest (bushes, little trees, big trees)

Here the valley, where is the plane tree, where babies are learning to hunt...at dusk.

- mother bats leave the place during the night to go hunting far from this place, each one in a different place, we found 4 different hunting territories, one near the plane tree, 2 near inhabited places, the last in the forest in the canyon above the valley.
- we had a very interesting observation about a mother showing a roost in a watermill to her baby, we enter the place without antenna only with the receptor and with red light (these bats don't see red light)

It's very interesting to study bats, and as you can see, I'm quite passionate by the subject, spending 11 nights without sleeping ( I'm far too old for this now     ) As a natural area manager, I gain a lot of precious information to manage natural places studying bats, cause they are very fragile species and by protecting them and their roosting or hunting place, you increase biodiversity (they only hunt where there are a lot of bugs of course, so if you can manage places to have a lot of insects...you will have a lots of insects eaters : birds, bats, frogs (if you have water) and so on...  
Hope you enjoyed discovering bats conservation study with explanations and some few pictures In the future, I'll probably disapear again, I'm complaining but I very like that


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:iconOmoidenoki:
Omoidenoki   

"Omoidenoki really has written a rare and informational report on bats in the South of France with some stunning photographies on where bats use to live, how to observe them and on how to preserve their lives and habitat. Thank you so much for sharing this great bit of informa by the nice thanks a lot