our first bat walk
sept. 2025

Recently, Friends of Clay Pit Wood helped run the first bat walk with the Lost Woods team.

This walk involved an informative talk about bats followed by a walk-through of Hassocks, where attendees could listen out for bats using special bat detectors. We were unlucky with the weather on our first walk as it started raining a lot when we got there. The bat detectors can be easily damaged in rain so we had to be careful about when we used them during the walk.

Inside Proper Coffee, we gave an intro to bats, explaining their anatomy and yearly cycles. After the talk, we started our route towards Clay Pit Wood. We stopped at a tunnel on the way down, where we demonstrated how bat echolocation works (very fascinating). Several UK bat species were discussed such as the common pipistrelle and soprano pipistrelle bats, explaining the different frequencies they can be heard at. We then demonstrated how to use the bat detectors, then went down to the Clay Pit Wood entrance to listen to some bats.

We continued listening for bats whilst walking along the footpath and then walked into a grassy area on the path, to listen further. It did start to rain quite a lot there so we had to protect the bat detectors. Umbrellas are a great choice for bat walks, as those with umbrellas could shield them from the rain. The grassy area combined with the Clay Pit wood entrance and the tunnel made for some excellent listening spots for bats. We started to head back to Proper Coffee after spending some time in the area.

At Proper Coffee, we ended with a short talk about what the Friends of Clay Pit Wood group is and explained projects such as our iRecord and iNaturalist species trackers.

We heard a range of bats on the walk, including:

Common Pipistrelle at 45kHz


Soprano Pipistrelle at 55kHz


(c) Daniel Hargreaves

Serotine at 25kHz

There is clearly a large variety of bats in the local area and we would be eager to check out Parklands Copse and Pheasant Field in future. Another bat walk into Claypit Wood would be interesting, in particular because of the body of water, but we would have to be more cautious due to the uneven terrain in the dark.

All in all, the bat walk went really well, and we were happy to see everyone enjoying themselves, and the shared sense of intrigue towards bats was nice too. We were a bit worried that there would hardly be any bats due to the rain, so we were very glad to have heard so many. The weather ended up being much nicer on our second bat walk, and we heard many bats then too, indicating that they are prevalent in Hassocks.

If we do further bat walks, I hope we visit places like Pheasant Field, as then we can map out more areas with bats. If you know other good locations for bat walks in the local area please do let us know via our email, claypitwood@proton.me , and thanks for reading!

You can find out more about bats and how to host your own bat walk here: https://www.bats.org.uk/

And you can find out more about the Lost Woods Project here: https://www.lostwoods.org.uk/