We watched the first episode of Dan Snow's series on the Armada last night, on catch-up. It's pretty good, almost no expenses spared with historical re-enactments and CGI galleons, and an impressive line-up of historians, one of whom had uncovered new and relevant documents from the Spanish side. The idea of having Dan Snow sailing up the English channel so that we could see the site of the action wasn't bad either. My only quibble was when he claimed to be in a 'howling gale' like the conditions at the time, and then ten minutes later did it again. It didn't look like any sort of a gale (moderately high waves with breaking crests forming spindrift. Well-marked streaks of foam are blown along wind direction. Considerable airborne spray), at most it was a bottom end five (moderate waves of some length. Many whitecaps. Small amounts of spray). The Systems Administrator said that probably the BBC's insurance wouldn't have let them send the camera crew out in a gale. Or maybe there wasn't one when they were scheduled to film.
I digress. It's worth watching, and at least with Dan Snow in a boat most of the time he wasn't walking around flapping his hands at the camera. Take three paces, hands fly apart, next pace, press fingertips back together. Repeat spasmodically. So many documentary presenters and news journalists do it, I think they must be taught to on some course, and I find it unbelievably distracting. I digress again.
As the final credits rolled I saw something flit by outside. The SA thought there had been something as well, and suggested it was a bat. We waited, and the thing flew by again, followed by another, or the first going back again. It, or they, were tracking back and forth parallel to the house and quite close, at around the level of the first floor. Once one flew towards the house, then did a spectacular about-turn and flashed away. They looked huge, and we wondered what species of bat they were. The pipistrelle is the most common, but I thought they were tiny. Certainly the ones I've seen at the Tendring Show on the Essex Bat Group stand looked very small. On the other hand, I've just looked up their vital statistics on the Bat Conservation Trust website, and see that although they only weigh 8 or 9 grammes, their wingspan is given as 200 to 235 millimetres. Twenty centimetres, or eight or nine inches in old money. That's not so tiny. Of course when I have seen them at the show their wings have been folded up, and some of them were babies.
We went outside to try and watch them close up, but either our presence disturbed them or they had finished with that bit of the garden, because all we got was one sighting parallel to the wood. We stood anyway for some time, looking at the roses in the moonlight and the outline of the Metasequoia and the Cedrus deodara. This close to midsummer, it's still not properly dark at half past ten, and I can see why popular tales had the fairy folk riding abroad at this time of year. The outside seems strange and wild, dark and still light at the same time. The mythic, Tam Lin atmosphere was slightly punctured by Our Ginger who had followed us out and was rubbing around our legs and squawking, puzzled why we had suddenly decided to go into the garden in the middle of the night.
I once asked somebody who had a bat detector how easy they were to use, and as I feared the answer was, not that easy. They don't come with the different species of bat marked on the dial, tune in, squeak squeak, result, we have pipistrelles. They just play the ultrasound to you, transposed to a pitch audible to the human ear, and you have to identify the species from the sound. The same species will emit different clicks in different types of surrounding. I thought my best chance of identifying what sort of bats we had was probably to ask someone who knew how to use a detector to come and listen to them for me, if I ever happened to strike up a friendship with a bat enthusiast, but to date none of my friends have revealed a hidden talent for bat detection.
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