Sunday, March 22, 2009

Eavesdropping on Golden Gate Bats

I'm almost done with collecting data for my thesis! I have only one more park to do, which will hopefully happen tonight if this storm passes today. I've recorded one night per quarter in each of 21 parks in the city. So far I've found four different species. Still to come: completing the analysis of this round's calls, doing the statistical analysis of my results, and then writing it up. I'm hoping to get everything together by the end of this month, so I can spend April writing, and schedule my thesis defense for mid-May.

I do have news on the PhD application front, but I'll post about that soon. The good news is I got accepted to at least one school for next fall.

In this picture, my detector rig sits in the tree in the foreground, aimed out over Stowe Lake in Golden Gate park. I haven't looked at the files I just got, but in the past I've had hundreds of Mexican Freetail calls, and a few Yuma Myotis calls from this location.