I saw a Silver-haired Bat (and recorded its echo location) flying around the southern end of Turtle Pond. On days early or late in the season it is not uncommon to see a bat in the late afternoon. Nice to see my third bat in a week.
One of the joys of birding in Central Park is that will all of the great birds, come great bird watchers who find rare things. Today’s great find was a Silver-haired Bat that must have been disturbed during the day and ended up sitting on a sawdust covered log in the Tupelo Meadow.
At first the bat looked like it might have died, with no sign of life. But as it got darker, the bat became more and more active, until it flew off into the dim light of dusk.
I stopped by Central Park’s Pond on my way home. The Pond is located just north of the Plaza Hotel at the south east end of the park. The usual suspects were there, including a Wood Duck, a Black-crowned Night Heron, Mallards and Canada Geese, plus the hundreds of Common Grackles coming home to roost in the trees surrounding the Pulitzer Fountain of Grand Army Plaza.
What I didn’t expect to find were two Eastern-Red Bats feeding at around 6 p.m. Usually, I need to rely on my Echo Meter Touch to identify my bats, but these were clearly Eastern-Red Bats just by watching them. I did my best to get some pictures without flash in the low light.
After sunset, a Red-tailed Hawk flew around the Pond and the buildings on Central Park South. I suspect one of the adults we saw bringing nesting materials to Crown Building earlier this year. These hawks continue to be a mystery, but it was good to see they’re still around.
Yesterday, I spent an hour listening for bat echolocations, as well as watching them around the Conservatory Water, aka the Model Boat Pond. Bats are migrating through the city, and with it getting dark earlier, I don’t have to stay out too late! So the next few weeks are perfect to go bat watching.
Using the Wildlife Acoustics Echo Meter Touch 2 Pro Bat Detector and iOS software, I was able to capture a large number of echolocations. The software does its best to identify which species of bat it hears, sort of like a Shazam for bats. The software can make mistakes, so my results could have errors. While I recorded a great number of bat passes, a single bat could have created many of them.
Click on either chart to enlarge it.
Now that we’re in late September that number of bats seems to be declining at the Model Boat Pond. Tonight I got 8 recordings of Big Brown Bats, 29 recordings of Eastern Red Bats and 29 recordings of Silver-haired Bats. Of course a single bat will have multiple recordings. These number are a lot fewer than a few weeks ago, although the Silver-haired Bat number are the highest I’ve seen for this species.
Tonight, the ratio of Eastern Red Bats to Big Brown Bats recordings was 129 to 38, where last week it was an even split. But I don’t know if it was a change in the number of bats or if the Eastern Reds just hung out longer. Last week, the Eastern Red Bats came out early, followed by the Big Brown Bats. Tonight, the Eastern Red Bats stayed until it was very dark.
I have no idea if the number of bats has changed or if the food sources changed. Unlike Bird Watching, which has a long history of citizen science and great databases (eBirds, Christmas Bird Counts, etc.), there are almost no resources for bats. There are no hot spot maps for bats for example! Or online records of when to expect different bat species to be present in Central Park. This is going to take time to figure out!
