Friends of Adel Woods

A beautiful evening and twenty nine adults and eleven children gathered in Alwoodley Village Green car park at 7.45 pm for a bat walk led by Leeds City Council rangers, Rachel Todner and Joe Craig-Jackson.

To begin the event, the Chair of Friends of Adel Woods gave a brief address describing the various habitats in Adel Woods, and the work done by our volunteers, before introducing Rachel and Joe. We then made our way along Crag Lane to the peace and quiet of Old Leo’s car park.

Once in Old Leo’s car park Rachel and Joe distributed bat detectors and cards listing the species of bat that can be found living in the UK.

An introduction to bats and bat detectors

When we all had bat detectors, Rachel gave an introductory talk about bats. She explained that contrary to popular belief, bats have good eyesight. However, because they hunt at dusk and night they have evolved an echolocation method of hunting and navigating around their environment. They send out high pitched sounds and use the echos which bounce off insects and objects in their surroundings to locate obstacles and their prey.

She explained that there are seventeen breeding species of bat in the UK which each make echolocation sounds at specific pitches, and this is one of the ways that we can tell which bat species are flying in the vicinity.

Because the echolocation sounds made by bats are too high pitched for humans to hear, we need to use bat detectors to pick up the sounds and convert them to a pitch we can hear. By adjusting the detection frequency of the detector we are able to tell which bats are around.

The batwalk

From Old Leo’s we made our way into the woods to have a look at some bat boxes made and put up by Friends of Adel Woods in 2010 to provide roosting. The chair of FOAW explained that these differ from tit boxes in that there is no round hole in the front of the box. Instead, the back board of the box extends down below the box and bats land on this and crawl up into the box through a slit in the base.

FOAW put up seven bat boxes – four on one tree and three on another, each of the boxes facing in different directions so that the bats could choose which box they preferred to roost in. We do not know if the bat boxes have been used as it is a criminal offence to look into them.

From the bat boxes we made our way along Crag Lane to the picnic area where we were excited to see our first bats of the evening. The frequency of their echolocation, 55kHz, indicated they were soprano pipistrelle bats.

From the picnic area we continued to Adel Crag, which the sculptor Henry Moore said was one of his sources of inspiration (along with the slag heaps of Castleford!). There we saw a number of bats which we identified as soprano pipistrelle and common pipistrelle (45kHz).

From the Crag we made our way back along Crag Lane to the disused rugby field to the north of Crag Lane. Here we saw many bats, including soprano pipistrelle, pipistrelle and noctule bats (25kHz). Rachel also wondered if we saw a brown long eared bat in the middle of the field based on the frequency of its echolocation (48kHz) and its size.

Finally, at about 9.30 pm we made our way back along Crag Lane to the Village Green car park. On the way we picked up many calls from noctule bats.

If you would like to find out more about bats in the UK, have a look at the bat conservation trust website.

It was a very successful and enjoyable evening and we received some lovely messages of thanks from the participants.

“Thanks for arranging the bat walk last night. Very enjoyable.“

“Thank you for the very enjoyable bat walk last night!“

“Just wanted to thank you for running the bat walk, the kids and I had a blast.”

Join Friends of Adel Woods

We hope that you have enjoyed reading about our activities and would be delighted if you would like to join us.

Friends of Adel Woods were formed in 2009 to help maintain Adel Woods and encourage people to enjoy them. We meet one weekend morning a month to carry out various jobs or ”work parties”, and we also put on educational events such as bat walks, fungal forays and birdsong walks.

We are a very friendly group and welcome new members who want to help preserve our special woods, enjoy fresh air and exercise in the woods, and make new friends. If you would like to take part in our activities, keep an eye on our Home Page and come along to one of our work parties.

If you would like to join our email mailing list, please get in touch by leaving a comment on this website – you should be able to see a comment button at the bottom of this page.