Bats in the trees and near the water

Recorded with a Magenta Bat4 detector, plugged into the EDIROL R-09, this is the sound of bats using echolocation to find their dinner in the trees surrounding the canal. I love the bat detector because watching the bats around where we live is a very great pleasure, but since they only come out at dusk, you can easily miss just how many there are. The detector allows me to hear these little comrades, and I love following them sonically, especially when it is too cloudy to see them visually. There were several bats around on the evening when I made this recording, and everything I was picking up was between 45 and 65 kHz, so the bats were either Common Pipistrelle or Soprano Pipistrelle bats (apparently both species can produce sounds between 43 kHz to 59 kHz) and perhaps even Daubenton's bats down by the waters of the canal (we are so lucky to have a lot of bats in our neighbourhood). The bat detector pitches these very high frequencies down into the range of human hearing, but the rhythms are all the product of the bat, and us trying to follow its movements with the detector. The results are hissy as you can hear, but I think it's amazing to be able to get some sense of the complex sounds which bats use to locate their prey. I am sorry my information on bat species is so shaky, I am just getting the hang of the kit and the whole idea of which bats sound at which frequencies.