a more unusual hobby shed find

[pgk pgkParticipant @pgkpgk17461]

My shed is fully ply lined and uPVC doors and windows

I picked up a rag to wipe hands after working on a mower to find something odd underneath. It wasn’t until it breathed I realised it was a sleeping pipistrelle. Rather than go get camera etc I just covered him/her up again.  I’ll leave doors open at dusk and help it out then with a suitable pole on standby

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Excellent !

I haven’t seen any bats for a couple of years, despite all the conservation efforts.

Some of the new-build local houses were even built with “bat boxes” on the wall

… singularly uninspiring contraptions, to my mind, and any local bats would appear to agree.

I do wonder if the inverters for the solar panels may be upsetting them ??

MichaelG.

.

This was in June 2023

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

While I rarely see bats when we had a village walk around with a bat expert using detectors, at the right time of dusk with little wind the place was seething with their calls. Still quite difficult to see as they are just a fleeting glimpse of a black spec in the tree tops.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Nice – we have some hideous concrete bat igloo things, but they are inhabited – I do agree though that the population does seem very depressed – it’s been an appalling (few) year(s?) for insects on the wing..

Can’t remember when I even last saw a Long-Ear, seem to remember them as being very common where I grew up..

[pgk pgk]

On 27 August 2024 at 13:31 pgk pgk Said:

My shed is fully ply lined and uPVC doors and windows

I picked up a rag to wipe hands after working on a mower to find something odd underneath. It wasn’t until it breathed I realised it was a sleeping pipistrelle. Rather than go get camera etc I just covered him/her up again.  I’ll leave doors open at dusk and help it out then with a suitable pole on standby

On a warm evening, please.

I built a bat box as one of my COVID lockdown projects. It is now on the end of the workshop, about 4m from the ground. I have no idea if it is occupied but there have been Pipistrelles very local to me for many years.

JA

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Pgk Pgk –

I don’t know what country you live in, but if in the UK…

Be Very Careful!

Please do verify this with Natural England (an amateur bat-group may be prone to “gold-plating”) but I am pretty sure it is ILLEGAL even to photograph a bat, let alone handle one, without a special licence.

…

Michael –

Unlikely the inverters would upset bats unless they (the inverters) emit a sound somewhere within the bats’ hearing range, so possibly confusing them.

Although such a sound is likely to be of low level at source, and the higher its frequency the shorter its range as increasing absorption adds to the inverse-square distance attenuation.

More likely your local bats have been driven away by the new housing-estates removing the insect habitats and roost sites on which the animals rely. I have seen them hawking around some blocks of flats near me, presumably having learnt the cluster of street and house lights attracts lots of nice juicy moths.

[Nigel Graham 2]

On Nigel Graham 2 Said:

Pgk Pgk –

I don’t know what country you live in, but if in the UK…

Be Very Careful!

Please do verify this with Natural England (an amateur bat-group may be prone to “gold-plating”) but I am pretty sure it is ILLEGAL even to photograph a bat, let alone handle one, without a special licence.

…

Michael –

Unlikely the inverters would upset bats unless they (the inverters) emit a sound somewhere within the bats’ hearing range, so possibly confusing them.

Although such a sound is likely to be of low level at source, and the higher its frequency the shorter its range as increasing absorption adds to the inverse-square distance attenuation.

More likely your local bats have been driven away by the new housing-estates removing the insect habitats and roost sites on which the animals rely. I have seen them hawking around some blocks of flats near me, presumably having learnt the cluster of street and house lights attracts lots of nice juicy moths.

I suspect that my mum wouldn’t care if it was illegal to handle one when she was screaming at my dad to get one out of her hair that had come in through an open window. A long time ago now so I don’t recall what happened to the bat.

[Nigel Graham 2]

On Nigel Graham 2 Said:

Michael –

Unlikely the inverters would upset bats unless they (the inverters) emit a sound somewhere within the bats’ hearing range, so possibly confusing them. […]

Which is exactly what I had in mind … although I have no evidence either way

MichaelG.

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

And as for photos I carry this in my wallet

You have the right to keep any photographs you take unless confiscated via a warrant. You do not need permission from your subject to take their photograph. You own the copyright to any photographs you take, not the subject. You cannot be removed or restricted from taking photographs from a public place.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

The previous owner of one of my clients’ houses built a new one next door to her. As there were Bats found on the survey that had to build suitable alternative accomodation for them before any other work could be done. As you can see from the attached it is quite a structure and a bit more than just a box.

 

[pgk pgkParticipant @pgkpgk17461]

Commonsense prevails. It going to starve in my hobby shed with no way out. There’s plenty of suitable outbuildings and bat boxes on this hobby farm and I’ve even had the occasional rogue fly in through the conservatory door in the past and needed encouragement to leave. And I’ve handled bats before in my past career.

Pgk

[mark costello 1Participant @markcostello1]

One from across the pond…. I was out fishing one night years ago. We have a pond about 100′ from Our house. I was casting a plastic worm into the pond. A bat went for the worm on a cast. I decided to throw a high looping cast and the bat nabbed it. I reeled it in and when it was about 20′ away I started to wonder how I would unhook it. Thankfully it unhooked itself. Plan ahead… not that time.

[Grindstone CowboyParticipant @grindstonecowboy]

Re the photography aspect, what IS illegal is to disturb the bat. Using a flash would undoubtedly do so. Probably OK if you are a reasonable distance away and not using artificial lighting.

Rob

[pgk pgkParticipant @pgkpgk17461]

At sunset (using the rag) I relocated it to an upstairs outside windowsill and 30 mins later it was gone .

[pgk pgk]

On pgk pgk Said:

At sunset (using the rag) I relocated it to an upstairs outside windowsill and 30 mins later it was gone .

A good result. Life now belongs to the bat.

JA

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, I’ve got bats in my attic, occasionally a very young one will find its way into the house, crawling along the carpet, so I use a glass jar and a piece of card to pick it up and return it to the attic, but very often they are too weak to survive, and many of them are dead when I see them in the morning.

Regards Nick.

[Clive SteerParticipant @clivesteer55943]

We often get bats in our garden at dusk as they fly a circuit through neighbours gardens and sometimes they fly a very tight circuit just in our garden. However one evening I went into our lounge and whilst watching the TV a bat flew out of the pelmet of the curtains and proceeded to fly around the house. Luckily all the internal doors were open. I opened the bifold doors in our dinning room and it found its way there and flew out.

I have no idea how long it had been there but glad it found its own way out without us having to trap or handle it.

A great experience but not as good as seeing the fruit bats leaving their roost under a bridge across the Colorado river in Austin, Tx. I arrived there on a business trip in late afternoon with the air temperature at 104F and at about 3am my body time sat on the banks of the Colorado to watch the nightly spectacle along with hundreds of others. To see something like a million bats the size of large birds fly out and “perform” similar to a murmuration of Starlings is a natural wonder to behold.

CS

[Diogenes]

On Diogenes Said:

it’s been an appalling (few) year(s?) for insects on the wing..

 

Not a formal investigation but…:
Living in Southern France, I have made a couple of trips back to the UK this year by car. On each occasion I have run the car through the local carwash to clean the white vehicle on the outside prior to several thousand kms. Pausing near Calais on each occasion, the front of the car was visibly covered with insect remains. Once in the UK, I also did a car wash and then drove around at all times of the day around the West Country and to and from Dover. After 3 weeks of the initial trip and 10 days for the 2nd trip, my car was almost clean. Several hours into my return trip in France and once again, the insect evidence was obvious….
Hardly a scientific analysis, but interesting nonetheless. We btw have bats around the garden every evening around dusk, along with visible clouds of insects earlier in the evening.

[Martin Dilly 2Participant @martindilly2]

Noticed just the same after getting back to the UK last week after a fortnight in France. Whatever French insects are made of makes a pretty good adhesive when screenwash and wipers are used. In Britain about the only thing that needs screen wipers is traffic film and spry from other vehicles. It’s actually pretty worrying when you stop and think what the absence of insects must mean for plant pollination and dependent wildlife. Do you remember those attachments like Perspex snowploughs that people fitted on the front of the bonnet on cars like Zephyrs and Veloxes in the 1950s? They were supposed to deflect the airflow and keep windscreens bug-free. No need for them today and I’m sure it’s not just due to better car aerodynamics.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Bats have very good homing instincts and remarkably strong route-memory, but they are also inquisitive, which is why you might find isolated ones in sheds or the house. They could be seeking shelter, or they might have chased an insect there.

Entering the living area of a house is probably rare, but they do like undisturbed lofts as roosts, preferably clean ones so in newer buildings free from masses of cobwebs and dust. The modern home insulation might also make the roost temperature more attractive to the animals, particularly for their nursery and hibernation needs – some species at least can be quite fussy, it seems!

.

The matter of greatly reduced insect populations is a serious one, affecting very many ecological areas, not just bats and other insectivores. The aerodynamics of modern cars very likely does save countless invertebrate lives by the slipstream lifting them clear; but there are significantly far fewer of the tiny animals anyway. They were not only squashed on the windscreen, but many others died on the radiator.

Those 1950s cars. some with vaguely-American styling, were not very aerodynamically-designed, but since their top speeds in normal, pre-motorway driving were probably below 70mph, that might not have made little difference to their efficiency in days when that seems to have been of lesser significance than now.

Gimmicks like projecting sun-screens above the windscreen, and rear windows sloping the wrong way, would have played havoc with any attempts at air-smoothing. Even without those though, the styling just made them good at slaughtering moths and gnats.

So the modern car kills few insects… but has far fewer to kill. Bad for everyone.

[bernard towers]

On bernard towers Said:

And as for photos I carry this in my wallet

You have the right to keep any photographs you take unless confiscated via a warrant. You do not need permission from your subject to take their photograph. You own the copyright to any photographs you take, not the subject. You cannot be removed or restricted from taking photographs from a public place.

This sounds very reasonable to me.

Sadly the UK police don’t seem to be aware of this? I saw a rather unpleasant video some years ago of a member of the public being assaulted by three officers for videoing some of their colleagues on his phone whilst they made an arrest. I expect there may be a change in the law before too long. I’m thinking of the Manchester Airport incident of several weeks ago.

[pgk pgkParticipant @pgkpgk17461]

Laws regarding video may be different? As I recall when researching CCTV for my business (many years ago) it is illegal to have CCTV coverage outside your boundaries without good justification and signage. If so then all the new fashion for door bell cameras likely breaches that.

pgk

[pgk pgk]

On pgk pgk Said:

Laws regarding video may be different? As I recall when researching CCTV for my business (many years ago) it is illegal to have CCTV coverage outside your boundaries without good justification and signage. If so then all the new fashion for door bell cameras likely breaches that.

pgk

I have put link below to the ICO site here for the privacy rules.

 

https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/domestic-cctv-systems/#object

 

This was of interest to me because I have some CCTV (privacy masks applied) & a video doorbell.

 

What does amuse me regarding all this privacy thing is:-

When something dodgy happens the Police ask if anyone has video doorbell or CCTV footage which might help.

Do they say thank you but do you know you are breaking privacy regulations?😉

op

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Just an amusing little update on the neighbouring bat-box [pictured earlier]

Still no Bats, but two Magpies found a use for it … sheltering from the rain:

.

.

Apologies for the image quality … I wasn’t going out in that !!

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Nor were the magpies!

Spotting two together… isn’t that supposed to bring good luck, or joy?

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