The Friends of Nore Barn Woods

2019

A static bat detector was placed in Nore Barn Woods in July 2019 by Nik Knight, the Hampshire Bat recorder.

11208 recordings were made, which were downloaded and put through the automatic ID software. All the interesting recordings were examined and a large sample of the others.

From the evening of 12/7/19 to the morning of 31/7/19, at least eight bat species were recorded: common pipistrelle, soprano pipistrelle, Nathusius’ pipistrelle, serotine, noctule, brown long-eared, western barbastelle and bats from the genus Myotis, including Natterer’s. The most significant of these is the rare western barbastelle, recorded on two successive nights.

Nore Barn Woods turns out to be an excellent area for bats! All these records have been entered into the county bat records database.

2022

 Report of bat detector recording were made over a fortnight in late April and early May.There were 2396 recordings on the static detector, which is less than a similar last study in July 2019. The good news is that there were 11 recordings of the rare barbastelle bat, which was present on at least 6 nights. This begs the questions. Is this more than one bat? And, does it roost locally?

Other species recorded were: Brown Long-eared, Common, Soprano and Nathusius’ Pipistrelles, Noctule, Leislers, Serotine and assorted Myotis bats (which in most cases can’t be identified reliably from spectrograms). One of the Myotis recordings on 4/5/22 is likely to be a Natterers bat. Others could well be Daubentons.

We look forward to taking further recordings in the spring next year.

2024

I am pleased to repot the findings of this years bat survey.

Bat recorder located at 30 Maisemore Gardens adjacent to Nore Barn Rythe from 13/05 until 31/05.

A total 6069 individual recordings were analysed. Analysis showed that 9 different species were identified. A total of 70 records of Barbastelle were observed. These occurred most nights over the period.

This is most significant as this species is very rare and is subject to very high levels of protection, and the areas of their grazing are highly sensitive. The regular recordings indicate that these bats are in transit from their roosting location to their feeding grounds within the wood, the adjacent fields and along the shoreline. This also highlights the importance of Nore Barn North Woods being used as an important wildlife corridor.

Soprano Pipistrelle bats made the most recordings, twice as many as the Common Pipistrelle. Less frequent were the recordings of Noctule and Serotine.

Nathusius Pipistrelle, Long-eared, and at least 2 species of  Myotis bats make up the 9 species recorded.

We thank Nik Knight for the loan of his recorder, and the considerable amount of work in analysis of the data. While software is able to provide a large amount of automatic analysis,  manual identification was required for 924 records.

Barry King-Smith

 

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