Water bat
1 sound
If you visit this part of the river at dusk on a summer evening, you are likely to see bats leaving their roost and foraging up and down the river for the insects that they eat. Wimborne is home to a colony of Daubenton's bat, which is a specialist water bat. These make a range of ultrasonic calls, which are outside the range of human hearing. You can hear them using a bat detector, which alters the frequency of the sounds. These recordings were made in this way. The sounds are a mixture of bats echolocating, to sense different objects, and the sounds they communicate to each other. The chirrups rising rapidly in frequency are made when the bats catch an insect, such as a midge, caddisfly or mayfly.
