Live from Lava Beds

Setting up equipment Originally uploaded by unquenchable.fire

This week I'm up at Lava Beds National Monument, near the California/Oregon border, for the BCI Acoustic Monitoring class. I'm so excited to see my bat friends, the lovely scenery, and get all my questions answered. Since we have internet access here, I'm hoping to post photos and some of the highlights as the week goes by, at least until I'm too sleep deprived to function. In this shot you can see some of my classmates and instructors getting the equipment ready to record calls at an evening fly-out from a nearby lava tube cave. We later recorded calls from about a dozen different species. I got my detector and recorder set up to do handheld recording. To do this, I listen to the bat calls using headphones, and when I hear a bat go by (sounds like a series of clicks) then I push a button to save the data for later analysis on my computer.