Going batty at West Hartford. 29/2/2012

Aquired the car late on yesterday afternoon so thought i'd have a couple of hours up the road. On arrival i had a single Short-eared Owl hunting in front of me but it drifted over the larger body of water and continued over the fields by the River Blyth. Initially on the pool were a couple of hundred gulls but as i approached they all lifted and numbers drifted of in different directions. I was left with 10 Oysterecatchers and a scattering of Teal around the fringes of the phragmites. Not much else to report initially but as the light started to go i had a second Shortie to my left in the vicinity of the farm on one of the fence posts. It lifted then dropped to the ground and that was the last i saw of it.

I sat in amongst the trees between the two pools for 20 minutes after the light had gone but it was when i was leaving and had passed the metal railings of the compound on my left that someting caught my eye. It turned out to be a bat. As i stood watching between the tree line and compound the bat kept flying back and forth along the line of the path at a height of between 2 and 3 metres. It stayed with me for a good 5 minutes and as i made clicking noises with my tongue it seemed to stop in flight and come to me to investigate. I had it flying within 300mm of my head at times. I know that sh*t attracts flies so it may just have been that i had attracted some insects close by and that is what it was after. The individual was between 75 and 100 mm across the full width of the wings and 50 to 75 mm head to errrrrrr tail. It seemed to be feeding by aerial hawking so having checked out a couple of web sites going by its jizz i reckon that of the 15 or 17 species ( depending which site) in this country the chances were it was a Common Pipistrelle. Of course, had i had a bat detector i would have known immediately by the frequency it was using for echo location.

Absolutely no chance of an image of the mammal so this was the best i could manage.