Phantom Beeps

One of the side-effects of doing telemetry is that it doesn't take long before you start hearing what we refer to as 'phantom beeps'. When you are driving around for hours searching for a bat, listening to static from the receiver, as you can imagine, sometimes you start to hear what you think are beeps, when in actuality there is nothing. This has kinda been our lives for the past two weeks or so. We put a transmitter on a new big brown bat last Monday (the 16th) and then proceeded to never find her. Every day one of us would drive around, for hours at a time, searching for this bat and never hearing a signal. It got a bit frustrating after a while to be honest. Began thinking that we had lost our ability to do telemetry. And of course, kept hearing phantom beeps everywhere. Luckily, we had other work to do so that we could rotate who did telemetry, giving ourselves little breaks for listening to static to do things like acoustic surveys and mist netting. Then this week on Tuesday night (the 23rd) they put a transmitter on another big brown. Sarah spent ALL day yesterday tracking her, with no luck. Again, super super frustrating for her. I offered to do the telemetry today (along with Miles) so that she could have a break. And the weather was ominous so we weren't expecting much. Drove around for about an hour and then we turned down this one street to head to an area Sarah suggested we check, and suddenly.... A BEEP! AN ACTUAL BEEP! I turned to Miles and we were both like.. you did hear that right?! That was a beep wasn't it?! And we both heard it, and kept hearing it. Of course, pretty much at that instant it began to downpour. Because that is just how our luck is. 

Still, by sitting around in the car waiting for it to slow down and then jumping out and listening between downpours to get a direction, we ended up being able to figure out on which property we believed the bat to be. No one was home so we could not pin point the exact location, and the weather was still sucking so it would not have really mattered anyway. The main exciting thing was to have finally heard a signal and located a bat. 

From then on out telemetry was much kinda to us. We put transmitters on a few other big browns and were able to find them all with relative ease most days (although one did like to vanish every once and a while, and then turn up again back at the same apartment. Pretty sure she just liked messing with us). 

Overall it was a general relief to end the session with more telemetry success. Even if we never did find a roost tree again. All of the big browns roosted in various houses. Making for a nice creepy end to the internship! Most of our time was spent asking for owners' permission to walk on their land and to stare at their house to watch bats emerge. Sitting in some random person's yard for an hour at 8pm and just staring at the side of their house was certainly not creepy. At all. Right? 

(side note - post internship I was walking in my neighborhood at dusk and saw a bat flying around. Had the strongest urge to start creeping around my neighborhood to figure out where the bat was roosting so I could creepily watch said house. You'll be pleased to know I did not follow that urge. As badly as I may have wanted to)