Category Archives: bat walk

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.

A fine evening for a bat walk led by our local council ranger, David Preston, ably supported by fellow ranger Toby Amos from Gotts Park in Armley. We had thirty five attendees – twenty six adults and nine children.

We met in Alwoodley Village Green car park at 7.15 pm and, after introductions, David distributed bat detectors and information about the seventeen species of bats which breed in the United Kingdom.

Bats come out at dusk and fly around silently (to the human ear) at great speed. Unless you are a real bat expert, the only way to identify bat species is by using a bat detector.

Bat detectors pick up very high pitched sounds made by bats in flight and convert them to a pitch which humans can hear. Different species of bat make sounds of a specific pitch so that it is possible using a detector to identify the type of bat you can see whizzing through the air above you.

Armed with our bat detectors, we made our way along Crag Lane to Old Leo’s Rugby Club’s car park. Here David gave us some tuition on how to use the bat detectors.

Bats are able to see, but do not have very good night vision, so they use send out regular high pitched shouting sounds which we can’t hear and use the echos that come back from the objects around them to navigate their way through the trees and around their local area, and hunt for insects while flying. This is a process called echo-location and it is the high pitched shouting sounds which bat detectors pick up. There are various types of bat detector and we were using ones which you can adjust to different frequencies to identify bats in the vicinity.

From Old Leo’s we made our way into the woods to look at some bat boxes put up by Friends of Adel Woods In January 2010. While having a look at the bat boxes, we got our first clicks from some of the bat detectors, but we were unable to spot any bats flying around.

Bats don’t build a nest but find somewhere they can roost or raise their young in holes in trees, caves or buildings – or in tailor-made bat boxes. Bat boxes are different from nest boxes for tits and sparrows in that they don’t have a hole in the front. Instead, there is a thin slot in the bottom of the box and bats land below and crawl up into the box through the slot.

Having said the above, bats will sometimes roost in bird nest boxes. A few years ago, when Friends of Adel Woods were cleaning and surveying our nest boxes, we were amazed to find a noctule bat hibernating in one of them. We were even more surprised the following year to find a noctule bat – presumably the same one – hibernating in the same nest box. On each occasion we immediately closed the box and put it back up causing as little disturbance to the bat as possible.

From the bat boxes we made our way along Crag Lane to the picnic area where we got our first clear clicks from the bat detectors and sightings of bats in flight. It is always an exciting moment to hear the bat detectors start to click away and spot a bat flitting to and fro as it hunts for insects around the canopy of the trees. A pipistrelle bat will eat 3,000 tiny insects in a single night and it is awe-inspiring that it catches these insects using only sound echos to identify where they are, their size and shape, and their direction of travel.

From the picnic area we made our way to Adel Crag, where we saw and “heard” more bats.

An interesting fact about Adel Crag, is that the sculptor Henry Moor said that the landscapes which most influenced his work were the slag heaps of Castleford and Adel Rock. Today the Crag’s magnificence was partly obscured by a huge oak tree which had fallen over it, blown over by the recent Storm Lilian.

From the Crag we made our way back to the picnic area, along Crag Lane and around the disused rugby pitch, where we spotted more bats. Finally, we went down to the cricket pavilion before returning to the Village Green car park at about 9.10 pm.

On our journey through the woods we detected four different species of bats: pipistrelle; soprano pipistrelle; Nathusius’s pipistrelle; and noctule, our largest species. Nathusius’s pipistrelle is a surprise: the Bat Conservation Trust say that Nathusius’s pipistrelle is a rare bat in the UK though its numbers have increased in recent years.

All in all it was a very enjoyable and exciting evening, and we are grateful to David Preston and Leeds City Council for making it possible – and grateful to all our enthusiastic participants.

ABOUT FRIENDS OF ADEL WOODS

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.  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, just come along to one of our work parties or 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.

Our next events

Have a look at our Home Page for details of our next work party

Our next educational event will be on Sunday the 29th September 2024 from 2 pm to 4 pm when local naturalist Steve Joul will be leading a fungal foray. Please note, this is not an event for collecting mushrooms to eat, but an opportunity to learn about the many species of fungi to be found in Adel Woods.