German Bats

The "German Bats" album presents photos taken in the area where we live in Germany, it is in the vicinity of the city of Bremen. After I had retired at the end of 2018 leading to our return to Germany I have joined the local NABU conservation group in Weyhe and I have been supporting their Bats project since then. This work aims at preparing old bunkers, which are left overs from the war as bat hibernation spaces. Of course, I couldn't resist to take the bats on as new objects for my photography passion. You can find a short paper, describing how I have produced these images here.

Bats hunt and communicate using ultrasound. Humans can normally not hear their calls and songs, but based on my experience in hydro-acoustics I have prepared an example of a male bat display song, by slowing down the replay speed by a factor of 10 in order to provide an impression of how the this may sound to a bat. As you can see, bat acoustics has become another field of interest for me.

This is a song of a Pipistrellus nathusii (Nathusius's pipistrelle in English or Rauhautfledermaus in German). Just click on the player and listen.

When processing the audio from above using a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software one can produce a so called spectrogram of this file, which is shown below.

Pipistrellus Nathusis' song

Enjoy and if you like, feel free to provide comments via the Contact page!