A sound artist in the bedroom
by Mark Cocker from on (#K1ZM)
Claxton, Norfolk The bat, micro-second by micro-second, sculpted the entire space of that room through bouncing ultra-sonic calls off all the objects present
It is perhaps the strangest wildlife alarm ever to be heard in our house. It began when our daughter at 3am, outside our bedroom door and shrouded in her duvet (to stop it getting tangled in her hair, she later revealed), announced that there was a bat in her room.
Sure enough, there was the improbable and rather forlorn vision of a medium-sized species, perhaps a brown long-eared or a Daubenton's bat, circling the lamp-lit rectangle of space just above her bed. Its flight path was necessarily short and repetitive. In fact, it reminded me of one of those black ragged props, popular in low-budget vampire movies from the 1950s, that used to circle on wires before the victim's blood was to be spilt.
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