Is That a Bat? A Guide to Non-Bat Sounds Encountered during Bat Surveys

There has been some ground-breaking development in bat detector technology in recent years, such as the Audiomoth and Echometer Touch, reviewed in BTO News, Spring 2018, which have enabled a much wider audience of non-bat specialists to become interested in bat sound identification. Newcomers to this are supported by a Facebook page ‘Bat Call Sound Analysis Workshop’ which was set up by Rich Flight for anyone to be able to receive comments from the wider bat community on sound recordings, and by two excellent books published by Pelagic Publishing. The first by Jon Russ on British Bat Calls: A Guide to Species Identification, and the second by Neil Middleton, Andrew Froud and Keith French on the Social Calls of the Bats of Britain and Ireland (the latter book reviewed in BTO News 312).

However, for new and experienced observers alike, there can be unfamiliar sounds. These may relate to difficult to identify bat species, but insects, birds and terrestrial mammals may also be recorded as ‘by-catch’ during bat surveys. This includes calls that can be confused with bats. Is That a Bat? also written by Neil Middleton and published by Pelagic Publishing, is the first attempt to pull together and summarise the current knowledge of many of these other sounds that are likely to be recorded during bat surveys. This is a complex area of study, where there is still much to learn. However, this book and downloadable call library does an excellent job in highlighting the potential for identifying other sounds, in a very entertaining book. Knowing that Neil Middleton was working on this book for some time and working myself on the sound identification of small mammals and bush-crickets, it has been a great opportunity to collaborate with Neil over the past couple of years. Many of the recordings collected by Neil have been built into software that I have been working on for the automatic sound identification of bats and other species groups, which is already being used to process ‘bat’ recordings. This has now been developed into our cutting-edge acoustic monitoring tool, the BTO Acoustic Pipeline.

Admittedly, this is an area of study that fascinates me, but this is the book highlight for me this year.

Book reviewed by Stuart Newson