The travel bans and social distancing measures that have been put in place to control the spread of coronavirus has resulted in all of my field work being cancelled so far this year. I was due to visit Denmark at the end of March and had planned to be in Oxford this week to test out a method of recording bats that I would like to apply in my MSc data collection. I also still have flights booked to Ecuador leaving on 9^th June but again I think this is unlikely.

Living in uncertainty is a strange concept and something which I have struggled with in the past. We book holidays, days out, dinner with friends, arrange work meetings, site visits, field trips – we plan for everything and suddenly when the rug gets pulled from under you, it’s a shock.

From my own personal experience this veil of normality was peeled back in the autumn of 2015 when I was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. For the next 12 months, I underwent an operation to remove two tumours, two rounds of adjuvant chemotherapy and a course of radiotherapy. I was successfully treated and thankfully I have now been cancer free for a few years.

However, there is always that niggling uncertainty. I don’t spend a lot of emotional time or energy worrying about whether I will get cancer again. I have learnt that things happen to you, around you and despite your best efforts. So, I live my life now with a level of acceptance and flexibility. I have no control over what happens to me, the only thing I can control is my attitude to those events, when they happen.

Life today isn’t what I was expecting at the start of 2020 or what I had planned but it’s still life and small pleasures can be uncovered as we “make do and mend”. For me that means finding different ways to see and record bat activity, locally and with the kit I have at home.

The only acoustic monitoring equipment I currently have access to is a handheld BatBox Duet. I tested this a few weeks back in my local park and you can hear an example of bat echolocation calls here. I started to do some research and see if there was any way to record those calls so that I can analyse the call data. If this is possible, I could begin to work up a sampling/survey plan to record activity over the coming weeks/months.

This is my experimental equipment set up. I’m connecting the BatBox Duet to a Sony Dictaphone and I’m going to attempt to record the left output which is frequency division onto my Dictaphone. I have no idea whether this will work. The Dictaphone might not be able to adequately record the high frequency bat calls. But this is all I have access to at the moment, so I’ll give it a go.

Tonight is test night, wish me luck!