Earth Notes: Bats Around our Home aka 16WW

Updated 2025-03-02.
Our house in a bat hotspot - pipistrelles rather than vampires! #bat #Chiroptera #dataset

Cheat podcast episode! Bats on the Hogmill River a few minutes' walk away:

2275s "20201007T18:10Z Hogsmill Lane Hogsmill River multiple bats FD10 bandpass 1500 to 7500Hz resampled 48ksps to 16ksps" (captions) Uploaded . Downloads:
  1. • small lo-fi very low-bandwidth audio/opus mono clip 4639kB (16kbps) +
  2. • mono clip 10861kB (39kbps) +++
  3. • hi-fi lossless audio/flac mono clip 48851kB (175kbps) +++++

Notes on Bats at 16WW

I am happy to say that there are lots of bats around our home. Mainly common pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) it seems, maybe a soprano pipistrelle or three. They can be seen flying at about bedroom window height against the dusk and detected by their feeding and social calls. Feasting on mosquitoes and other insects.

A few minutes' walk away at the Hogsmill River is a veritable bat party feast, with other species such as Natterer's and Daubenton's in the mix.

The cemetery just over the road from 16WW also seems to host at the very least a crowd of pipistrelles (common and soprano).

It's all go round here!

Here are some 16WW Chiroptera notes, sounds and images, and anecdata, with some exposed slightly more formally as a dataset.

Local bat survey October 2018, from Alison Fure
October 2018 survey of bats in the 'hood, from Alison Fure.
201911 CRE pipistrelle bat activity heatmap Greengage ANON
November 2019 pipistrelle activity hotspots at Cambridge Road Estate — marked Greengage, now believed to be public domain. (Click through for highest-resolution image.)

Detail

For more detail of observations at 16WW and elsewhere, and tech and analysis, see the following by-year sections:

Dataset

name
16WW Bat Activty
description
Bat activity with audio and spectrograms, at or near 16WW, Kingston-upon-Thames, London, KT1 3JA, UK
version
1
keywords
bat, Chiroptera, urban, London, England, UK, ultrasonic, detection, Pipistrellus, pipistrelle, common pipistrelle, 45kHz, soprano pipistrelle, 55kHz, Myotis, audio, heterodyne, het, frequency division, spectrogram
variable measured
activity
date created
2020-09-18T14:20:37Z
date published
date modified
2025-03-02T15:40:37Z
temporal coverage
2018-10/..
spatial coverage
UK centre 51.406696N,-0.288789E elevation 16m
canonical URL
this descriptive text with markup
distribution
bat data folder
distribution
16WW ambient sound recordings: bats
licence
this dataset is licensed under CC0, ie it is effectively public domain; if you make use of this data, attribution is welcome but not obligatory
is accessible for free
true
creator
Alison Fure
Damon Hart-Davis