BirdWeather’s Backyard Bat Detector Tells You What the Bats Are Doing — Not Just That They’re There

After two months and more than half a million detections across two continents, BirdWeather’s bird-listening network now listens for bats — and several thousand existing stations are about to join it

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Most people who look up at dusk and see a bat wonder the same two things: who is it, and what is it doing? Starting this summer, a backyard station from BirdWeather can answer both.

The Bat Edition PUC from BirdWeather is an acoustic station that listens above the range of human hearing every night, identifies the bats that pass over, and reports what they were doing — including the feeding buzz, the split-second burst of calls a bat makes as it closes on an insect. It is the first always-on consumer station to automatically classify bat behavior, not just bat presence — the kind you mount on a fence and forget. Researchers have detected feeding buzzes with lab tools and custom software for years; this puts it in the backyard, every night, with nobody running the analysis.

In its first two months, 380 Bat Edition stations logged 577,396 bat passes — 321,268 across North America and 251,170 across Europe — and identified 30 species in North America and 31 in Europe. Every recording came from a garden, a porch rail, a fence post. Nobody drove a survey route or borrowed a detector for two weeks. On the night of International Bat Night, August 29, 292 stations in 20 countries recorded 23,867 bat passes — and no one had to do anything.

“Birds are easy to love. You can look out the window and see them, and you can hear their songs. Bats are, literally, a different animal. It’s dark, they’re silent to us, and most people would have a hard time knowing they’re there at all. What’s fun isn’t just learning which bats are out there — it’s finding out what they’re doing. That a bat over your yard was actually chasing something, and caught it. That’s the feeding buzz, and now you can track and listen to it in your own backyard — while you sleep,” said Tim Clark, founder and CEO of BirdWeather.

“With a BirdWeather station we get an exact timestamp of when a bat or bird vocalized — far more behavioral resolution than a two-hour checklist. And because we know when and where a station is operating, we also learn which species are not there. That kind of presence-absence data goes a lot farther in ecological analyses than presence-only records,” said Neil A. Gilbert, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biology at Oklahoma State University.

The network behind it. BirdWeather operates more than 10,000 active acoustic monitoring stations in 80 countries and territories, built over four years around automatic bird song identification. The Bat Edition extends that network into the ultrasonic. Because stations are permanently mounted, the measure that matters is detector-nights: every station listens every night. The bat network has accumulated more than 12,500 detector-nights since July 1. Volunteer bat-monitoring programs in North America and Europe have run for decades and produced invaluable long-term data. All of it depends on someone going out and doing something. Here, nobody has to.

Several thousand more stations, this month. BirdWeather has also opened a beta that adds bat detection to existing Bird PUC stations through a software update. Those stations report bat presence and timing — a bat was here, and when, down to the second — with the full ultrasonic spectrogram and slowed-down playback. Species and behavior classification remain a Bat Edition capability, because they depend on the Bat Edition’s full-bandwidth 250 kHz capture. More than 150 owners signed up in the first 24 hours.

It goes where the bats are. The Bat Edition runs on its internal rechargeable battery or on USB-C power — wall adapter, solar panel or power bank — so it mounts on a fence line or a pond edge instead of wherever there happens to be an outlet. And it comes with you: take it camping, or to the local bat walk.

The Bat Edition PUC is available now at birdweather.com for US$499, shipping to the United States and Canada, and through BirdWeather’s distributors and resellers elsewhere.

About BirdWeather

BirdWeather, from Scribe Labs Inc. (Half Moon Bay, Calif.), is an always-on bioacoustics platform: the PUC field station, a mobile app and a web dashboard, built on open-source machine-learning sound identification. Launched by crowdfunding in 2023, the network now spans more than 10,000 active stations in 80 countries and territories; since 2021, stations have reported from 135 countries and territories and logged more than 4 billion detections of more than 5,000 species. BirdWeather is an open system, and its data has underpinned peer-reviewed bioacoustics research. Learn more at birdweather.com.