Walking into the Botanical Gardens on Saturday night I was not expecting much. I had signed up for the night session and the bat group believing that would be the most interesting. I was put into a group with a bat specialist and we were tasked with the job to study the way bats “see” with echolocation. To do this we were geared with two devices, one that picked up the high echolocation frequencies and converted it into sound we could hear aloud, and the other that recorded the echolocation sounds, saved them and analyzed them.

The first 20 minutes of the trip was interesting. It was cool to hear the click like noise coming from the bats that was used to guide themselves throughout the air. We walked around the park trying to find areas bats were flying around in so that we may record their sounds, as you can imagine the fascination swiftly faded. Soon I found it more interesting to be walking around a park at night than studying the bats, simply because the noise coming from the machines was the same every time and only sounded like clicks you can make with your mouth. Not only did the trip become monotonous but we were never really tasked with a specific goal, and were not given a way to record and information ourselves. We had a device to record the sounds but as soon as the trip was over it went straight into a room with the staff and we did not get to see or hear any of the information recorded at all.

I left Bio Blitz thinking it was a waste of time. I had not gained any specific knowledge except for a few “fun facts” told to us by the group leader. I had also not received any data I could do anything with and thus I fail to see the whole point of the trip. Hopefully in the near future we can receive the data we collected on the device so that something came out of this trip.