Session 9 - We've Gone Batty.

In our their literacy lesson this morning, the children have been reading the biography of Batman, so we couldn't resist following through with the bat theme in Forest School this afternoon.

Although we don't have any bat roosts in the school grounds, they are known to use the school as a feeding place.

 We began the session with the Bat-Moth warm-up game. In this game, a blindfolded bat is placed at the centre of the circle whilst two moths circle around him. The bat uses his echo-location by calling 'bat' to which the moths respond 'moth'. The bat must listen carefully to work out where the response is coming from in order to home in on his prey.

Imath went first. initially he left large gaps between his 'bat' calls given the moths chance to move around a lot between their responses. He quickly realised that if he called 'bat' often the moths would have to keep responding making them easier to track.
We experimented with changing the size of our circle to see how much harder or easier it made it to track our prey. The children became very good at homing in on their prey. I was not so good and had I have been a real bat, I would have been a very hungry one!

Next we carried out a survey of our site to see how suitable it was for attracting bats. We had previously looked at some information on the Bat Conservation Trust website*: http://www.bats.org.uk/pages/about_bats.html which outlined ways to make your garden bat-friendly. We already have a bog garden (planted with flag iris, forget-me-not, purple loosestrife and snake's head fritilary) which is ideal for attracting the sort of insects bats like to feed on.

We also have a large hedgerow around the perimeter of the school field. We read that linear hedging is particularly good for bats so we decided to create some more hedge corridors in our school grounds using the shrubs supplied by the Woodland Trust http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/en/learning-kids/schools/Pages/free-trees.aspx#.UKfX0IfCn14 . These shrubs included a mixture of elder, dogwood, dog rose, hawthorn, crab apple and holly.

The boys were so busy chatting to each other whilst planting that the session flew by. We just had time for a cup of hot chocolate and a cake before home time.

*There are lots of fascinating facts on the Bat Conservation Trust website. Here is just a small sample:

• All UK bat species use echolocation to navigate and hunt for insects in the dark. 
• A tiny pipistrelle can eat up to 3,000 insects in a night. 
• Things we get from bat-adapted plants include dates, vanilla, bananas, breadfruit, guavas, Iroko timber, balsa wood, sisal, Tequila and chewing gum! 
• Bats are more closely related to humans than they are to mice. 
• The majority of the world's bats eat insects - just like British bats. In the tropics bats also eat foods like fruit, flowers, frogs, fish, blood, even other bats. 
• Bats usually only have one baby a year and can live for up to 30 years.