Examination of bats in the hand.
All bats caught for this study were trapped under a licence issued by
Natural Resources Wales (licence no. 73106c:OTH:SRAB:2017). Catches took
place on multiple nights during the swarming seasons of 2013 and 2018,
in four different areas of the woodland around the focal cave (“Middle
Earth”). All catches were made within ~100 m of the
cave entrance. Bats were only trapped at the cave entrance on two
occasions, so as to minimise the possibility of bats in the traps echo
locating and being detected by the bat detector at the cave entrance,
thereby falsely elevating the number of calls recorded. Alternatively,
the presence of the trap may have acted to keep bats away from the cave
and therefore reduced the number of calls recorded. Trapping sessions
ran from sunset until bat activity declined substantially (in the early
hours of the morning). The exceptions were the nights of 22 September
2017 and 12 September 2018, when on both nights trapping terminated at
22.00 GMT even though activity at the time was high.