SG - Night Excursion on Campus
In short
Excursion- 28 May 2026
- 21:15
- Impulse Wageningen Campus
- Vleermuiswerkgroep Wageningen
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
We look into the eyes of a dog and imagine we know what the dog feels and how he or she shows it. The dog feels close to us: we live together, we sleep together, take long walks, and it is also a mammal, like us. The bat is a mammal too, but maybe the one that differs the most from our way of being in the world. At the same time we seem intrigued by this difference in how they orient themselves in the dark, their wings between the fingers, upside down sleeping and often matriarchal social structures.
In this series we try to get closer to the bat looking at how we capture them in our cultures, in our knowledge and in our art. And we look back on the famous article of Thomas Nagel ‘What is it like to be a bat?’.
View more activities in our series
Night Excursion on Campus
Join us for a night excursion and explore the WUR campus like you have never done before. When night falls this mammal becomes active, looking for food using echolocation. In small groups we will walk around and try to catch a glimpse of the bats living on campus.
Register for this excursion from 11 May onwards by sending an email to info.sg@wur.nl. Places are limited!
About Vleermuiswerkgroep Wageningen
Bat Working Group Wageningen
The Bat Working Group was founded in the spring of 2013 by Herman Limpens. With a number of enthusiastic volunteers, we try to learn more about the bat population in Wageningen and the surrounding area. We do this through three projects.
The bat logger: a hopping detector
The bat logger is deployed during the active bat season. This device ‘hops’ through the backyards of Wageningen and records foraging and flying bats in the garden for two nights at a time. The working group places the bat logger in the gardens and also collects it again. Have you always wanted to know which bat species fly around your garden? You can register your garden for the following summer via the email address knnv.vleermuizen@gmail.com.
Network for Ecological Monitoring Bat Transect Counts (NEM VTT)
As part of NEM VTT, the Working Group drives three vehicle transects with a bat logger every summer. We have routes in Renkum, in the Binnenveld, and in Ede. In this way, information is collected annually for the Mammal Society's summer monitoring network. This network is specifically aimed at the species: Pipistrelle, Siberian Pipistrelle, Red-backed Bat, and Noctule.
Excursions
During the bat-active season, we organize a number of evening excursions. Using a bat logger/bat detector, we go in search of bats and their roosts. In 2016, the Noctule was the focus of this.
Analysis
Naturally, all sound files collected during the bat's active season must also be processed. We do this in the winter, when the bats are in hibernation. The Working Group then analyzes the recordings using a computer and the program ‘bat explorer’. Quite a job!
Date
21:15 - 23:30