New Experiences

12 Jun New Experiences

Tomorrow will be the start of my 5th week here in Cuyahoga Valley NP. It is crazy to think that I have been here for that long. Time has flown here! Lately, I have been getting things together to for this week of sampling. I have been going around to all my field sites and marking down important information for the volunteers to know. Things like what sites are we surveying like Stanford Barn pictures above, where to stand at the sites to get an accurate count of the bats, water, and restroom access, what they need to have for the night, like a radio, bat tally sheets, etc. It has been a fun process of trying to figure out what needs to go into a citizen science project.

Learning about how the Anabat Walkabout unit and how the Echometer Touches work has been a really fun process. The Echometer Touch is a really cool and user-friendly way of seeing what bats you have in your area. The really cool thing about it is that it will tell you the species that you are listening to in real time. The echometer plugs into your Android or Apple product so everyone can have one and the app is free. I want to invest in one myself to see what kind of bats are in my area back home. The Anabat Walkabout is a higher-end device that will show you the echolocation calls on the screen, but it does not show you the species name right away. You have to download a software called Anabat Insight and then it will tell you the species you are listening to on your computer. Very cool to see the echolocation calls more clearly on the screen. I can’t wait to share how our first week of sampling goes!