Did you hear that feeding buzz?

That was fantastic.

Do you see them?

Wow!

Danielle Gustafson is something of a citizen scientist

Not a scientist per se, but someone who voluntarily collects data, that’s necessary for the study

and conservation of species

She also leads people on walks

in New York’s Central Park

to observe and understand the only flying mammal in the world:

Bats.

Did you also just know it was going to be bats?

That was going to be your thing?

Of course not.

Of course not.

Who picks bats?

You did.

Or maybe bats picked me.

Bats suffer from incredibly bad PR.

There are a lot of Dracula connotations

And vampire bat connotations

Well Batman seems like it actually does a few good things for the bats,

except when they’re actually on screen.

Pretty much anything you wanna know about bats and New York

it hasn’t been studied

Poor bats.

They’re so poorly studied.

The citizen scientist movement around bats and other creatures

Is being lifted by a small audio technology company

called Wildlife Acoustics

We listen to birds, we listen to frogs

We listen to bats, we listen to whales

Our customers are on the front lines watching

major shifts with warming climates

and sort of the movement of species now finding broader ranges

where they didn't use to have, and what effect

that has on the ecosystem.

Recently, they’ve turned their attention on hobbyists and citizen scientists

The bat detectors that we have now

used to cost thousands and thousands of dollars, and only professionals had them.

Wildlife Acoustics makes a range of listening devices and apps for iOS and Android

Like Song Sleuth, a five dollar app that’s like the Shazam for birdsong

And one of their recent releases, the Echo Meter Touch 2,

is basically the Shazam for bats

For $179, you can plug in this little accessory, hold it up to a night sky, and listen for bats

The free app that comes with them can identify them based on the way they echolocate, because

all nine species of bats in New York echolocate in different ways.

And for that reason, did you know that’s why they all have different ears, to catch

sonar in different ways?

Some bats are echo locating over 100 kilohertz

Or 150 kilohertz

So it’s way beyond our range of hearing, and it’s way beyond most microphones and

electronics by design.

The device brings it down to a frequency that the human ear can hear, and that’s how you know

when to look up

And as they get closer and closer to a prey item, they start echolocating faster and faster

and in the very end, when they’re right on top of the moth,

it sounds a little bit like somebody giving you the raspberry

So it’s like tch-tch-tch-tch-tch

Plllfffffttt!!!

It’s incredibly cool.

So far there’s no public database where citizen scientists can upload their data

Thought both Danielle, through her nonprofit Bat Conservation International

And Wildlife Acoustics say it’s something they want to create

I will also say I had kind of a dream to have

many people conducting bat walks

so kind of like it becoming a thing.

So just so you know it’s a thing in England

People over there figured out it’s kind of fun to listen to bats, because once you’ve

done it, it’s kind of addictive.

It hasn’t exactly caught on but I’m thinking this technology, the new technology,

mobile technology, could change everything.