Part-time job | Fares counts bats in the middle of the night

The surveys sometimes take place as many as five years before cavity walls are filled or roof tiles are replaced. If protected species are present, housing associations have years to gradually seal gaps while luring bats or swallows to alternative locations using nesting boxes.

Red Sea

Abuelhassan has loved nature all his life. It started in Egypt, where he was born and raised in Hurghada, a city on the Red Sea. “I saw the storks migrating every year. I found it so impressive.” After moving to Sittard-Geleen at the age of nine, his Limburg grandmother fostered his love of birds even further. Like her, he became a member of Vogelwacht Limburg, a bird-watching organization.

It’s no surprise, then, that years later he took notice of an Instagram vacancy for an ecological field researcher surveying swallows, house sparrows and bats. Along with his application, the student submitted an article he had happened to write for N!, the magazine of study association Van der Waals, about bat detectors. ZIJN R hired him soon afterward.

This summer, he worked an average of twice a week with a group of colleagues in Eindhoven neighborhoods and in towns such as Budel-Schoot, Steenbergen and Loon op Zand. The main question: are there bats in a building?

“I spend the whole night sitting on a chair, staring at gutters and roof ridges, with a bat detector in one hand and a phone running the reporting app in the other. Sometimes residents have questions. Once, a man came over to ask why I’d been staring at his mother’s window for hours. Fortunately, I was able to explain it clearly, and I was wearing the company’s yellow vest. Afterward, they gave me a cup of tea.”

Activity

During each shift, there is an hour when you have to pay particularly close attention. At dusk, during the 45 minutes when day turns to night, bats emerge to hunt for food. They do so silently, and a bat can suddenly drop from beneath a gutter or out of a cavity wall. Abuelhassan has to be very alert.

During the morning shift, around sunrise, bats are easier to spot. “They start by swarming, flying around the facades in groups. It can take as long as five minutes for every bat to eventually go inside. It seems like a social activity in which they teach future generations what makes a good place to sleep in a building.”

He always works alongside others. That’s another major plus of his part-time job. “My colleagues are, let’s put it this way, unique people. I’ve met a giraffe keeper, a marine who spent 40 years in the military, and people who work as math teachers during the day, for example. They have completely different jobs and perspectives. And there you are, driving with them in the middle of the night to some unfamiliar place to count bats. Sometimes I feel it’s a shame that we live in a bubble at the university. I’ve learned a lot about people whose days look completely different from mine.”

“The working hours are magical, but not practical”

And there he sits while almost everyone else is asleep. “But no matter how tired I am, even at four in the morning, it’s amazing to have animals come toward me. Bats fly at me because my warm body and the light from my equipment attract mosquitoes and moths. Weasels, martens and other nocturnal animals come over, too. Sometimes a cat climbs onto my lap. You could say the working hours aren’t practical, but they are magical.”

Listening in

Humans can hear sounds up to 20,000 hertz. Bats produce echolocation sounds above 20 kilohertz. “We use a bat detector. It’s a microphone that makes ultrasonic sounds audible to human ears. Yes, the night sounds very quiet—until you use one of these devices. Then you can hear electric cars from far away, cat scarers, electrical boxes and bats everywhere.”

Since April, he has had to train himself to recognize different sounds. Every species sounds different, and particular behaviors have their own distinctive calls. A bat may sound like a wet fart when courting, “sorry to put it that way.” With its strange squeaks and crackles, the horseshoe bat in the marl caves of Limburg sounds like an alien. Another species makes a sound like a tap dancer. Abuelhassan can distinguish the sound of a bat snatching a mosquito from that of one flying away or using courtship calls to find a mate.

Hibernation

The work is seasonal, and now that the bats are settling down to rest, Abuelhassan’s part-time job is on hold for a while, too. Female bats hibernate in a different space from the males, sometimes in groups of hundreds. The males have already transferred their sperm when the two sexes part ways. “It’s a case of delayed fertilization. Actual fertilization only takes place in the spring, when the females become active again. It’s so amazing!”