Bats in the Attic

Nature Reports
By J. Millen

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There has been a maternal bat colony roosting each summer in the attic of the Old School for at least the last 30 years. Last year Jenny Balke sent samples of their droppings for identification of the species present. Four species were identified. This spring Jenny installed a pair of security cameras to get some assessment of the numbers present. Below is a short sample of the video. Denman Bats May 2017 was recorded in the morning (May 13).

Update May 31:

The scenes viewed through the cameras have revealed that the bats move around a lot during the day tending to huddle in masses early in the morning and then disperse as the attic heats up through the day. On the evening of May 30 between 9:40pm & 10:07pm 693 bats left the Old School roof from one of the exits to go forage. Of note there were then still a couple of dozen showing on the camera.

A sample of evening activity is seen in the video Evening Bats.


Evening Bats https://youtu.be/sq-MbTCjpxA

Technical notes:

Jenny bought a remaindered security camera set (meeting budgetary constraints) which turned out to have software for Microsoft XP operating system. Luckily my 13 year old Laptop is still running on XP and was finally persuaded to record some video.