Best book to get into bats and bat detector in Europe (1 Viewer)

[jurek]

Hi,
I want to learn more about bats, and especially about using a bat detector and bat ID by ultrasounds. I am based in Central Europe. What is the best guide now to learn things? I know much about wildlife and wildlife watching in general.

 

[Julian Perry]

Hi,
I want to learn more about bats, and especially about using a bat detector and bat ID by ultrasounds. I am based in Central Europe. What is the best guide now to learn things? I know much about wildlife and wildlife watching in general.

I would suggest building up your knowledge and identification skills using the following books:

Russ et al. (2021). Bat Calls of Britain and Europe: A Guide to species identification (Pelagic Publishing)
Barataud (2015). Acoustic Ecology of European Bats (Biotope Editions)
Runkel et al. (2021). The Handbook of Acoustic Bat Identification. (Pelagic Publishing)
Skiba (2014). Europäische Fledermäuse (VerlagsKGWolf)

 

[opisska]

The new Russ book has been highly praised by people into bat detecting. I have it, I have read a few chapters and looked at some sonograms, but it requires some sustained effort to start understanding. But it looks very practical - there is a lot of content specifically designed to teach you how to ID species and, more importantly, to make you understand how reliably the ID is, what the variations can be etc... It's the only book on the topic that I have so far but it looks like that for European bats it might be everything you need.

 

[S_Man]

I would suggest building up your knowledge and identification skills using the following books:

Russ et al. (2021). Bat Calls of Britain and Europe: A Guide to species identification (Pelagic Publishing)
Barataud (2015). Acoustic Ecology of European Bats (Biotope Editions)
Runkel et al. (2021). The Handbook of Acoustic Bat Identification. (Pelagic Publishing)
Skiba (2014). Europäische Fledermäuse (VerlagsKGWolf)

So these books have sonograms for all the local bat species, meaning that I should find the attached sound by comparing it with the book? (with some limitations of course, as mentioned by opisska). I suspect it's a bat because it's fully above 20kHz, but maybe other mammals produce pure ultrasounds...