A pair of bats (pipistrelles, I think) flying in my back garden tonight.
For the last couple of nights, a pair of bats have been visiting my back garden. My garden is a typical city garden – there are no tall trees in it, but plenty of flowers and plants (which presumably attracts plenty of insects). I’m not sure why they have just started visiting – it may be that there is construction work taking place behind the garden, which might have disrupted their usual flight pattern, or maybe they were always visiting and I didn’t notice before now.
Photographing bats can be tricky. The proper way is to set up motion sensors that trigger the camera and flashes when the bat flies through a certain point. I went for the simpler, more hit-and-miss way. The bats flew the same circuit around my garden, from the back right up to the back door, and down the garden again. When I stood outside the back door, they didn’t seem to pay any attention to my presence. I had a camera fitted with a wide-angle lens and flash. The lens was set to a fixed focus point, of about a metre, and as the bats flew towards me, I bushed the button when I thought they were around a metre. At times, they flitted no more than 30 centimetres from me, but they moved so fast, it was difficult to get a decent shot (I managed to get plenty of crappy ones, though). However, with the wide-angle lens, they were usually somewhere in the image, and with some judicious cropping and enlargement, I was able to get the pictures shown here (I was using a Canon 5D Mk 3 which has a full-frame sensor, enabling the images to be enlarged).
The Irish Wildlife Trust along with the Galway Bat group are organising a public bat walk this Saturday night at 9.30 – they’ll meet in the Dunnes carpark in Terryland. It’s free and open to anyone.
