It’s easy to add a note to a recording by typing it or simply recording your voice. I use it to add info about where I recorded it like “Super 8, Barstow, CA”. FSC’s ‘A Guide to British Bats’ is a fold out, laminated guide to help you identify bats through physical appearance and call frequency. My favorite flying bat photo I’ve ever taken (below) is of a Jamaican fruit-eating bat ( Artibeus jamaicensis) which is one of the only fruit-eating bats that occur in the United States (found only in the Florida Keys). But ironically, it is also one of the only species that Kaleidoscope doesn’t yet have a classifier for in the North American list. Even though it’s a fruit eater, it still uses echolocation. Previously thought to be a “whispering bat” it has since been proven that their echolocations are extremely loud! I photographed this one under a Maya ruin in Tikal, Guatemala. While the Jamaican fruit eating bat can be found in the Florida keys, you won’t yet find a classifier for it in the Echo Meter Touch 2 app Wildlife Acoustics is a big name in the world of wildlife audio research and they’ve built some of the most advanced wildlife sound identification software available. One of Wildlife Acoustics software products is called Kaleidoscope Pro Bat Auto ID. They’ve developed classifiers for 38 bat species in North America, which covers almost every species you’re likely to hear. But they’re also constantly adding to their list of classifiers for other regions of the world. At the time of writing they created classifiers for 37 species in the UK & Europe, 37 Neotropical species, and 21 in South Africa. You can see a complete list of species here.

The circuit board was designed to fit into easily available 40mm push-fit plumbing fittings as shown here:If you set it to “Sensitive” then you’ll get more identifications but they’ll be less likely to be accurate. Conversely, if you use the “Accurate” setting you’ll get fewer ID’s but you’ll have a much higher accuracy rate. If you want something in between you can choose “Balanced”. You can change the auto ID sensitivity in the advanced settings. I hit stop on the recording and a second later a box popped up on the screen. It was the moment I had been waiting for, the most likely match for the species I had just recorded. “ Big brown bat” it said. Eptesicus fuscus. The app identified my bat as a Big Brown Bat! Listed below is some great kit and books to get you started or develop your knowledge on bat detecting and bat watching: In our region (North Carolina mountains in the United States) bats hibernate in the winter because there are few insects around. But on warm days they may ‘wake up’ for short periods and became chatty with their neighbors. These social sounds are mostly within the range of human hearing. That’s what we could hear coming from the bat house. I managed to get some photos of them with both my phone and a DSLR camera by carefully pointing them up through the bottom opening of the bat house. We had at least three and possibly four in there! But I had little confidence in my bat identification skills so I had no idea who our new friends were. That’s when we started searching for a bat detector. A first look at the bats in our bat house. But who are they?

The Magenta 5 digital bat detector has a large frequency range of 10 kHz to130 kHz. The extended low frequency coverage makes it suitable for some insects and birds, as well as bats. A series of sharp, descending chirps, repeated in clusters. Someone was preparing to exit the box! I hit the manual recording button (which starts recording 5 seconds in the past so you don’t miss anything) and looked up. The chirps became louder and faster and then, right before my eyes, a bat descended from the box and swooped up over my head into the gloomy dusk. Woo hoo! A bat signal at 40 kHz thus is divided to 2500 Hz which is perfectly audible. And even a bat that produces sounds at 100 kHz can be heard at 6250 Hz. If your phone or tablet is GPS enabled, the Echo Meter Touch 2 records GPS data for each recording and embeds it in the metadata for that file. In the app you can look at a GPS view to see where all your recordings were made and follow the path you used between recordings! The GPS view of bat recordings I’ve made around my house.This interesting and absorbing kit helps to detect study and identify bats. It is a "heterodyne" circuit which mixes a tuneable oscillator with ultrasound emitted by bats, to produce an audible output. Thus the ultrasound is processed to generate audio signals which the human ear can detect. 20 to 110kHz tuning range. Front facing loudspeaker output. You can simply hit the record button and Echo Meter Touch 2 will automatically record whenever a bat echolocation is detected! You can choose parameters for recordings to suit your needs.