A team of surveyors from the Bat Group visited four unrecorded tetrads on the west of the county last night and found bats in all of them The locations were along the Erewash Valley Trail and some of the square only contained a small part of land. The first stop was near East Midlands Parkway station, which is adjacent to the River Erewash (the Notts/Derby border), and Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. We found three species there: noctule, common pipistrelle and soprano pipistrelle.
After getting the square to blue status (meaning it has 3-4 species – download the tetrad map from our Echolocation Location project page) we set off to the next stop in Trowell. Here we picked up quite a lot of bats including some Daubenton’s bats which we saw foraging over the water, a first for our new NBG member who was on the survey. Then around 22:40 we set off to our last two tetrads in Eastwood. We followed the Trail to the smallest of all tetrads and although we only got one species here – common pipistrelle – at least the square is now yellow (1-2 species)!! We had to stay within a small section of the path to be in the right spot. It was great doing parts of the Erewash Valley Trail by night, a first for me, and always fun getting out as a group to do some bat surveying.
As part of our Echolocation Location project we aim to survey 80% of Nottinghamshire’s tetrads for bats. This data will contribute to the production of a ‘Batlas’ publication for Nottinghamshire – which will inform land use and habitat management for decades to come. If you would like to get involved in citizen science and learn more about bats then please join Nottinghamshire Bat Group and get involved.We still have lots of surveying to do and 2017 is our last full year of recording so it’s important we get out and about with detectors! There is a fully list of empty tetrads here including information about how you can get involved.