OHC Summer Series #4: Bats and the Sense of Hearing

Summer Series #4
Bats and Sense of Hearing

Train Your Senses

• Sight: We observe the sky at sundown, we saw the silhouettes of birds and bats in the air, but didn't see any nocturnal insects.
• Hearing: We took some time to observe the sounds of the night starting at sundown: we heard dogs barking, wind rustling leaves, and a few lawn mowers in the distance. We tried again on a damp evening. The sounds seemed more muted. We all decided that we could hear better after the sun set and the sky began to grow dark then earlier at dusk.
  

Inside Preparation Work:
1. We read the lesson on Bats in Handbook of Nature Study. We have a few bats in our are but we weren't able to find any to observe. We watched some bat videos and discussed a previous vampire bat study we did at the Sedgwick County Zoo when the children were younger.

2. I read Discover Nature at Sundown pages 27-35 and pages 130-153. It was interesting but not very useful in our area of the city.

Outdoor Hour Time:
1. Things That Go Bump in the Night:
We spend about an hour outdoors at sundown, observing some of the sounds suggested in the book. Something else to listen for is “sudden silence” where the night noises completely stop and then start up again after a period of time. We hear that sudden silence and realized that it was due to a predictor coming round. We like to call her Junior.


Follow-Up Activity:
We looked up some bat websites and got a couple of bat books out of the library.