Going batty in Bluff

by Andrew Gulliford
Contributing writer
Recently a friend with sophisticated audio equipment and years of scientific research with bats stayed in room 431 at Bluff Dwellings.
Greg Auger explained to me that he recorded bats from sunset to sunrise on June 2, 2025 and studied a number of 15 second recordings.
He wrote: “Each recording contained multiple bat calls and can contain calls from multiple species but my software identified the most likely species in the recording file.
“Again, the number is not a count of physical bats, just a number of calls identified as the species.”
Auger explains that his data is most used to determine the presence or absence of bat species utilizing the call audio, time and date of the bat’s call, temperature at the time, and location of the recorder.
The recorder and software are produced by Wildlife Acoustics. To understand his research methods you can contact him at augerg@comcast.net.
What Greg Auger discovered on one night in June in Bluff were recordings from:
Mexican freetail bats – 884 calls
Canyon bats – 44 calls
Silver haired bats – 16 calls
Hoary bats – 45 calls
California myotis bats – 6 calls
So now we can be free to be batty in Bluff!