Biospeleology
Last week I went to France together with Tomas, to help in counting wintering bats in caves. In Belgium one is happy to count a few hundred bats during a single winter, in the south of France you can see thousands in a single cave.
However, due to cold mountain weather and endless presence of deep cracks -many bats hibernate as deep as possible, well tucked away- you see less species than in rainy concrete Belgium! But the numbers and the vast cave systems (some caves can be explored for more than 100 km!) turned us into very humble counters.
Here are a few images we shot.
Warm welcome to all mammal watchers. Now there are approx 25-30 brown bears in the Pyrenees. Numbers keep steadily increasing.
Local guy showing his personalized licence plates. We say yeah!
Preparing for duty
Greater horseshoe
Lesser horseshoe
Lesser
Lesser
Greater and mediterranean horseshoe bats (grote en paarse hoeven)
Mediterranean horseshoe bat (paarse hoefijzerneus)
Greater horseshoe
Greater
Cool pic by Tomas: Lesser horseshoe bat
4000-6000 Schreiber’s bats
“Where’s the party at?”
Bullfinch is always nice to see. Thanks to sunflower pits we got it much closer
Ferrari red bullfinch