Echolocation Location (NBG Project)

I was very fortunate to join Nottinghamshire Bat Group (NBG) the year before a big Heritage Lottery funded project took place, this definitely helped shape me as a bat conservationist but also with regards to being in a leadership role as by the end of the project I became Chair of NBG as well as the survey lead and helped our former Chair and Records Officer in ensuring the delivery of a large scale project that set out to record bats in at least 80% of the tetrads (2km x 2km) across the county of Nottinghamshire. We surpassed our expectations and finished the project with records from 91.5% ! Not to mention the final outcome of the project was a book 'The Bats of Nottinghamshire'.

In addition to conducting a large scale citizen science project focusing on bioacoustics, we also were involved with the National Nathusius Pipistrelle Project as well as radio tracking barbastelle bats as part of the Barbastelle Project and continuing with all our community engagement work. During my time with NBG, I went from learning how to take biometric measurement of bats and conduct acoustic analysis to teaching others these techniques and leading surveys across the county such as the Mass Transect nights we would conduct to gain valuable data on bats to inform their conservation. As Chair, I was tasked with helping ensure we met the project aims, kept within budget and delivered our report and book but also was tasked in getting our committee more engaged and active. By the time I left for my role as Research Manager with African Bat Conservation, NBG had become a very active bat group with a great atmosphere and people would even travel from other counties to come out on surveys with us and do training.

Some of highlights and achievements include:

We committed to deliver 12 walks to at least 240 people but by the end of the project we had delivered 50 to at least 1500 people. Several of the talks to groups led to them becoming involved with recording bats using the projects detectors.

We made at least four appearances on local radio and television and featured on Countryfile on BBC1, and even made an appearance on CBeebies.

We committed to select eight sites for Local Wildlife Site (LWS) status. Whilst LWS have no statutory protection they are considered where developments threaten to impact them. Our recording efforts identified 10 sites to submit.

We discovered the first barbastelle roosts in the county and undertook radiotracking which helped us understand how they were using the landscape.