Lesser horseshoe bats
1 sound
We are very lucky to have a colony of Lesser Horseshoe bats on site, which roosts in one of the old farm buildings. This is one of the rarer British bats, which has declined significantly in recent years. It is also one of the smallest native bat species. Like other bats, it uses echolocation to navigate in the dark. However the sound frequencies that it uses are much higher than most other bat species, at around 110 kHz. This is way above the limit of human hearing. These recordings were made using a bat detector, which converts these signals into audible sounds. The sounds you can hear were made as the bats left the roost for foraging, just after sunset. Some bats left the roost to test the conditions, before briefly returning to the roost. Little is known about bat social calls, but it’s almost as if the bats were communicating. What might they be saying to each other, do you think?
