Bats & Woodpeckers

Great Spotted Woodpecker

An Influx of Bats

On Wednesday night as I was tending to the tomatoes in the greenhouse I noticed an influx of bats flying around and I noticed they were coming from the adjoining property. I know there have been bats in my own property in the past and they are probably still there yet. The time was approaching 9pm. I decided to come back on Friday night at the same time and set up my camera and tripod and see what I could achieve on film. My new camera has an excellent video mode which takes HD videos and this was a good chance to find out how it would cope in the fading light.

Fading Light

Friday came and with some excitement I set up the equipment and waited until the bats started to appear. Just shortly after 9pm sure enough they obliged, I set the camera going and sat back with a nice cool beer and watched the spectacle. Some people feel uncomfortable with the knowledge of bats in their homes but I have no problem with them and find it quite an honour to have them living along side us. On a fully charged battery the camera will run for more than an hour. Unfortunately I didn't check the state of the battery before hand so I only got 10 minutes of filming and after editing I managed to get about a minute and a half of the bats. It maybe just as well as it seemed to take ages to get to grips with the editing program ( Windows Movie Maker), as it is a while since I've used it, but it was good practice. As you can see the camera coped well with the fading light. I hope you enjoy the results.

Maybe Next Year

The above video is one I did from the rear bedroom window a couple of weeks ago. (I apologise about the quality after bragging about how good the video mode was on the camera, but the file was so large it would have taken forever and a day to load.)As I blogged a short while back about getting visited by Mr & Mrs Woodpecker and family it was nice to get Mrs W on film. It's a pity I didn't have the camera a couple of weeks earlier when I had the chance to capture the whole family, maybe next year.