The Big Book of Summer Activities listed a Bat Discovery Walk for Friday night. We had been invited over to Karen's house to meet some people from Toronto but we decided that we would rather learn about the bats (You can take the Irish guy out of the first grade teacher but . . .).
We did go over to Karen's and had a little dinner. We met Monica and Jerome and their new adopted baby Evan. What a cutie! They have had him for about a year already and he is hardly a baby but he is still sooooo cute. And funny. They have recently sold their loft in Toronto and are looking to buy a property in the Loire Valley (Jerome is French).
We headed out to the EcoMusée in Veron at about 8. There was already a large group waiting. We hung about until 9 when a French professor type gave a PowerPoint presentation on bats in general (32 species in France) and the bats of the Loire Valley in particular (Common Pipistrelle is the most numerous based on analysis of sound recordings). It was a great presentation if you were in training for the Bat Out of Hell category on Jeopardy. Otherwise it was tooooooooo long (a common failing of all PowerPoint presentaions).
After the presentation (still sore bum from the PowerPoint Torture Chairs) we went outside to look for evidence of bats and to see the bats come out at dusk. We did find lots of evidence in the form of bat poop. The French Bat Professor Type had a device with a microphone for capturing the inaudible sounds of the bats. The device translated the bat emissions into audible sound so that we could track when there was a bat about. Unfortunately, there were so many people that not too many bats wanted to come out.
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