Walking with bats

S5E49 This week we join BCT member Mark Ferguson who has just released his latest album; Walking With Bats. What does it sound like to go bat detecting? From start to finish, this question has underpinned Walking with Bats. Mark's main goal throughout the album's development has been simple: to transport listeners directly to the field, placing their ears where his are so they can experience the excitement of bat detecting through their own headphones.  

• Find the album on Mark's website or here on Bandcamp
• Read Mark's blog on the BCT website
• Want to find out more about bat detecting? Take a look at our guide.

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Transcript

Steve Roe: 0:39

Hello BatChatters Welcome back to BatChat, the Bat Conservation Trust podcast for anyone with a fascination in these amazing nocturnal creatures. I'm Steve Roe, and this is BatChat series five. This is our fourth episode of Series five and in case you don't know by now, episodes are being released every other Wednesday from now until spring next year. If you're new to BatChat Welcome along. I'm Steve Roe. I'm an ecologist and in my spare time a trustee for the Bat Conservation Trust. We've got something a bit different for you this week. Sound artist and BCT member Mark Ferguson has just released his latest album walking with bats. His main goal throughout the album's development has been simple to transport listeners directly to the field. placing their is where his are so they can experience the excitement of bat setting through their own headphones. With marks busy schedule, we conducted this interview over the internet but as you'll hear, we've intertwined some snippets from Mark's album to give you a flavour of his work. Mark, do you want to introduce yourself? And then tell us what walking with bats is all about?

Mark Ferguson: 1:46

Yean sure. So I'm Mark Ferguson. I'm a wildlife sound recordist and sound artist. So my main background is obviously in recording natural signs. So just finished recently finished a PhD in this subject at the University of Birmingham, where I was looking at how to use wildlife signs, natural signs in creative context. So he's making lots of multichannel pieces, kind of putting audiences inside Bumblebee nests, transporting them into sort of almost down to the sort of ground level and kind of very detailed, close up level of different species. So that's kind of in a nutshell, what I kind of do, I take natural signs, and I use them creatively. I also just like recording them in general. And I've made some contributions to the British Library, sound archives, and I like to release my own albums and do my own recording projects occasionally. So that's what we're here to talk about. This is good, this is good. But this drill, right overhead, oh, no, they're not looking for you. I'm looking for this laser spot to oh, I can see it. I'm just going to run after it here and see where it is. At brilliant. Okay, so I've positioned myself just on the edge of this hedge row here. So I'm in the edge of my village, my home village in Northern Ireland castledawson I know these country lanes and roads inside I'd have spent most of my childhood exploring them flanked by honeysuckle, ash trees, really dense vegetation here Eric goes there so we've got two lasers but this is about that goes by a few different names lesser knock chill is one of them. It's basically a small rock jewel. But it's in the same genus as the common NOC tool. And they tell us and actually this is Nick tell this laser I write echolocating on the edge of this field, if I can just get closer every guy just position myself to say this get here. Okay, hopefully it comes back. Yes, it will. There it is. So I'm 20 by 22.4 kilohertz. It's just the most beautiful sight it's moving. Circling around this in fact, it's actually a hell of forts and ancient wrath, and all hell for it. And quite a few of these positions around rural mid Ulster and it's just at the very far corners, the village boundary.

Steve Roe: 4:35

Very good. So how did you get into into wildlife sound recording then? How did you end up in that sort of career? Well,

Mark Ferguson: 4:42

I mean, I think I suppose with most of us, I've always had an interest in natural world from from a young age. So it just kind of weird balance and childhood of about sort of a third video games 1/3 Being in the wild, and another third of reading lots of stuff. So that was kind of my sort of favourite activities as a kid. But yeah, I was always interested in in wildlife and music was also a very big thing for me. So that became a real a real interest. And so I ended up studying music at university level, Queen's University, Belfast, and then I did a master's degree and by that stage, I'd become quite interested in the sort of technologies behind recording. I was teaching myself a little bit of a little bit of programming to to manipulate audio, so I use programming languages to to manipulate signs I'm so he's doing all kinds of creative things with signs. And then I became very interested in in field recording as well as kind of a byproduct of that. So, at that point, I kind of came out of my, my studies and decided to go into the professional audio industry for a while. So I worked for leading audio manufacturer here in the UK, and then run by two and a half years into that job, I was offered some funding to do do my PhD. So probably about Orion that stage, I was really becoming very interested in wildlife sign recording, I already had been before that, but that was when it kind of solidified into this, this notion of, of using of exploring wildlife signs with with an artist's kind of ear, if you will. So that's pretty much what he did throughout my whole PhD. And the it's sort of blossomed into, you know, interesting kind of career as a sound artist, as well. So that's, that's, that's roughly the path, if you will. And

Steve Roe: 6:33

you've turned your hand to bat detector now, what is working with bats? And where does that idea come from then? Yeah,

Mark Ferguson: 6:40

so I suppose, like all good things, that it's come out of the pandemic. So, yeah, about, you know, early 2020, it was very busy time, PhD time, my daughter arrived, the start of 2020, as well. And there was obviously a lot of a lot of stress, a lot of a lot of things that had to be taken care of, at that time. And one of the one of the issues that sort of arose as a result of the the COVID 19 situation was, you know, how they keep recording how they continue recording wildlife. And so we had, obviously, you know, permitted exercise periods, and so on. So I sort of asked myself, well, hang on, you've got all this gear and all this stuff, what would be the best thing to explore an AI to kind of, to enable you to keep recording wildlife? And the answer was, was was bad, but detecting. And so I started I bought, I went straight to the good stuff, I got a Peterson dt 40x And I went out in the boat and just just basically taught myself, you know, all the frequencies to focus on for heterodyne detecting and sort of just learned it from from the bottom up pretty much and sort of got the classic texts by John Ross and Middleton and so on. So those are the kinds of things I just educated myself on as a white left sound recordist. And, as he kind of did that, as I kind of walked around, detecting I was looking for materials that would sort of convey the the narrative aspect I'm really interested in, in, in storytelling and in narrative, and in, in the emotional and kind of the creative aspects of craft, and I was looking for material that would convey this. And there's sort of one or two albums and things out there that I find there was an album by think Mr. McAleenan, Zita, where she uses bad signs in sort of, in a compositional context. I think this is Stuart hired to design did an album, using ultrasound and so on, but I couldn't really find really that much that focused on on the kind of the craft of birth detecting and your what's it like to actually be in the field with the detector, you know, and, you know, what's it like to experience that? And I thought, well, wouldn't it be cool to do a project that would encapsulate that and sort of convey that to the listener at home. And so that kind of that was kind of the seed was kind of planted there that kind of rattled around in the back of my head for a while. So I kind of ran with that I finished the PhD, survive that. And, and shortly after I thought, you know, I'll sort of throw this into the Arts Council and see what I can do. So they have a scheme, the Arts Council, Arts Council, England, have a scheme called and developing your creative practice, the vicp. One of the things I hadn't really narrated any of my work before I hadn't really done that. So I thought, you know, it'd be nice to challenge myself to actually, to go down the kind of, almost kind of sort of cliche podcast route of telling a story of narrating your experiences, but also focusing very firmly on the craft of architecting. And, and trying to bring the listener out into the field with me, if you will. So I threw that over to the Arts Council and explained that, you know, I wanted to develop myself in that way, and they got the funding for it, and that enabled the project to really take off. So it's pretty much an album of bad detections of of bad detecting trips, with a little with some bonus tracks thrown in at the end and just the kind of recordings themselves, and a little kind of studio interlude where I reflect on on what I've recorded in the previous year. It's lasers is just circling around. This is about that's really fun with pastors. This is quite a few these fields have been recently cut and spread the slurry. And there are some cows grazing in the fields opposite so it's very much about the farmland here and they will tend to feed on maybe dung flies. Probably maths and so on, on the edges of these fields, so this part is really flying quite fast. I would say easily about 2530 kilometres per hour at the moment is moving really quickly back and forth on the edge of this field.

Steve Roe: 11:14

For new mentioned there, you've got Pettersen D 240. X, how steep was the learning curve? And why did you choose that detector? Have you done the have you done the tracks using hedge Stein? Have you gone for the time expansion element?

Mark Ferguson: 11:27

So the answer well, both are quite both cases, no. So I have a dt 40x. But that's, that's a little bitty. So I actually did everything with the D 1,000x. Which is sort of very much a Rolls Royce. Of bug detectors. Not cheap either. But I was fortunate enough to actually got a secondhand one from a lovely chap in Somerset. I think he'd actually bought it and he'd never he'd used it, I think like three times in. And he took a completely different career direction. So it was basically brand new, and I got it for for half of what he didn't pay for it. So it was very good deal. So I went home sort of skipping home that day. But yeah, I did the whole I just figured this is this is a really interesting project. So I got the the best possible detector I could find. And I was really concerned with with sound quality there. So to my ears, at least, the the you know, the D 1000 acts as a bat detector is a very, very, you know, it's as good as it gets for Sonic quality for me. And that, of course enables a bunch of different things heterodyne you know, frequency division, time expansion, full spectrum, whatever you want. So yeah, that was the, that was the detector of choice, in terms of learning curve is a lot to learn for that detector. But you know, I suppose the other disadvantage of it's quite, it's quite chunky. It's quite a big detector to hold in the field. But it was basically able to mind a small omnidirectional microphone in the side. And that allowed me then to generate and sort of broadcast quality what I was doing in the field,

Steve Roe: 13:01

or have tried it myself and with the podcast kit and then with about stature and it gets quite unwieldy the amount of cables around us. Yeah,

Mark Ferguson: 13:11

it does. Yeah, you can, I mean, I'm quite understood. I mean, I think every wildlife sound recordist will will tell you that there's always some little tweak or modification to make with the detector and a new one record is free with the sim detector. For example, He's just put a little kind of like a little knob or like a little kind of rubber sticky pad on the full spectrum recording key just so we can find it in the dark without having to look down so just little kind of tweaks like that. So I've I kind of hacked together a way to mind this on the mic onto the omnidirectional microphone onto the D 1,000x. didn't look too good but it worked quite well for the project. And

Steve Roe: 13:53

whereabouts have you done the walks I know the clip you sent was from homeland in Ireland but whereabouts are the other the other ones? Yeah,

Mark Ferguson: 14:01

so as you said I'm from Northern Ireland as you said so there's a little bit of a focus there kind of about a third of the way through the project I went back home and recorded there for a little bit which was fantastic but most of the focus if I got all of the other focuses has basically been in the southwest of England which is fantastic but detecting territory anyway because you know you've got pretty much all resident species is I can't see I can't see it this is one of the problems of five to 10 There we go. Okay just pass straight across my course there is an up and down here to get the the strongest frequency let's go on. Shooting around 46 is good 46 is good for this. We got one common pet distro moving back and forth between to pass my head between T LED streetlights. I can't believe they're out in such windy conditions. I mean the trees are just swaying above me here. I've got at least one I didn't know if there are too many thing about these batteries, they just they're so small. I think maybe three or four centimetres long. And they weigh in at about probably between three to seven or eight grammes. And to put that in context that's about, it's about the same weight as a teaspoon full of sugar. So they're truly light, very small animals, and incredibly dexterous. So that flight they just witnessed there. It's always amazing to watch the flip, twist, turn, but have membranous wings, not feathered ones like birds. So that means they can pretty much turn on a dime on a penny really quickly, and they can just do the most amazing aerobatic flips, I've not been super lucky is to get the likes of Barbra style, for example. Or, you know, some of the mean sort of grey long haired bats out of the question, you know, to figure that out in the field is not really a possibility, even Brian long beard, but to be honest with you, they're just so difficult to detect. They're such, they're such a delicate anchor location. Haven't really got those, but it's pretty much been in the southwest of England areas around the Cotswolds not far off the river, river Severn. Those kinds of places, places that I know. Well, places which are kind of places with a capital P to me, so they mean something to me, I've been, I've been to them before I've recorded around them before. And I kind of had a good sense of what I could get there. I mean, there were a whole bunch of surprises in the project as well. But that was the that was the main focus.

Steve Roe: 17:05

And how long ago did you move from Ireland to Bristol them?

Mark Ferguson: 17:09

So I've been here? Probably, gosh, let me think. But about seven years, and I've been here, my wife and I have been here. My wife's from Poland. And then from Northern Ireland. We actually met in Manchester. Very romantic story, but we have a little daughter, she's growing up here too. So yeah, I've been here about seven years or so. And it's just it's a fantastic spot. Obviously, for natural history, kind of work in general. But you know, in terms of hooking up with other sound recordist and so on there, you know, there's opportunity there too. And, yeah, it's just the weather's generally speaking a bit better than in back home in Northern Ireland. Although not that much, you know, it's it's not particularly reliable. But, you know, for bats, it's a bit warmer, it's a bit. It's a bit more useful for bath detecting, let's say, and

Steve Roe: 18:01

with growing up in Ireland, obviously, there are no nachos over there. It's just lies, Liz, it went when you came over you now really, really easily able to tell the difference between nachos or like enlightens? Or is it still a bit of a challenge? No,

Mark Ferguson: 18:16

generally speaking, because lasers, it's not really that you know, it's nowhere near as common as my understanding anyway, as the as the NOC tool here, but just I mean, just knowing your frequencies like this was something I kind of drilled into myself from the ground up. So NOC chill, just remembering stuff like 1924, you know, for the two kinds of places to be with the heterodyne tunings, and then you know, lasers at the VA 2327 ish, for those kinds of to call kind of variant variants, the sort of QC F and then FM QC F. So just knowing the frequencies and going through those like those two, what I call sort of bottom species down at the bottom, of course, you've got the common and soprano pipistrelle social calls happening down there too. Which, you know, if you're starting out, you have to be aware of and then just, you know, we're going farther up the spectrum into sort of, well, serotonin territory 2627 28, and then Brian longbeards, sort of 33 ish, and that's the easiest in the higher sort of 30s, and then mid 40s, common pet, mid 50s, Soprano, Pepin all the way up to a greater horseshoe at one lesser horseshoe 111. And you've got the male species, which are just, let's just leave loose out of it unless you see them or unless you take them home and really kind of full stack them on a on a spectrogram. At some, it's tough. And even then, you know, actually, it was like the other day in the car tools and sheeps come, which is absolutely beautiful spot and the Gospels and recorded and they noticed species and have to say put it through spectrogram. And I was looking at those calls. And I thought, you know, that's an abandoned, but but it wasn't really behaving like a Tibetans at all it was just flying around at my sort of head height, away from water, it wasn't anywhere near a water body. Okay, so that that really looks like a dependency that looks sort of kinky around 40 kilohertz. And then I was kind of looking at something but hang on, it's not really it's more of a whiskered kind of situation, as I couldn't figure out I just put my eldest species it's so tough to get this this virus species down to even with I would argue even with like a full spec. I think that's where AI is definitely going to help us out there in the future a little bit.

Steve Roe: 20:22

Yeah, definitely. I have to say I still struggle with splitting the Myotis. Certainly. What sort of challenges have you had along the way? Were there any

Mark Ferguson: 20:31

lots of challenges? Yeah. To be on was was the part of the challenge was just as I said, I was sort of I did this project to develop my kind of narration capabilities. And I like to speak about my work, I like to have a chat with people. But I've done quite a few presentations. But this was kind of different. And there's a lot to talk about here. But I'm not get into a lot of it sort of about the sort of investment of the Recordist in the field and what that means for white left sound recording. But that was the kind of first main challenge was learning how to, to read and just kind of to do it naturally not to kind of come in with sort of an artificial kind of framework there. Because people can kind of tell you know, if your attendees, you sort of have pre rehearsed stuff, so I just want it all to be natural, I just literally just planned the trips overnight with the detector, just some kind of just to see what I could find pretty much. You know, a lot of the other challenges were things like anthropogenic noise. So I went to fantastic spot in Arlington, it's just around that sort of portion of the sovereign, where it kind of curves around, just kind of opposite, just beside wheels and the sort of southwest of England. And, you know, there was a lot of farming activity happening around the field. So I kind of had to go back a second time to get something useful there. And that, I mean, I would say those were the kind of the two main challenges also just just remembering, you know, I talked about the frequencies and stuff and just knowing what, where to be at with the heterodyne detector, but just remembering that when you're trying to narrow it, you know, it's also a challenge. I mean, people don't really realise how difficult it can be to talk about what you're doing as you're doing it. So that was interesting. And you know, just you think that you would say oh, yeah, you know, I'm kind of at 26 kilohertz at the moment and stuff and did you then try and remember if you actually said that if you did like that Did I did I say something completely wrong there just little things like that. But in the end it just kind of abandoned all those worries and went with it. I just thought there was something up to 111 No, that's 81 that was at a greater was that a greater horseshoe but I honestly I think that was that was a greater horseshoe bought. Right. Elif is very macro. That's literally a greater horseshoe, but I have never recorded a greater horseshoe bot. Ever. Just kidding. I can't believe that. So I was tuning around 40 Yeah, that makes absolute sense. It was a bit 40. Yeah. At 1am odd one, no. There are literally greater horseshoe bots. I can't believe that here. I was not aware of there must be a wrist nearby somewhere. But that's pipistrelle to do once you. I don't want you anymore. pipistrelle. I can't believe that. So I was tuning around 40 kilohertz, that's gonna be the fundamental of that species. So the horseshoe bots, the strongest frequencies like the second harmonic, which is essentially twice the the fundamental frequency. I can't really explain that No, but it's not the strongest frequency but it for a greater horseshit would be run 40 kilohertz, and that's just where I caught it. What's that? No. Is that maybe the return of the ceratonia? It's all kicking off now. And, you know, to be honest, the the main goal Steve is to is just to kind of get people Well, the main question I asked myself was, What if you can't get out to detect? You know, it's okay, talking about being a weightless sound recordist and, you know, we talk about these adventures in Bath detecting, and even you know, as researchers, and if you're doing ecological work, you know, getting out quote, unquote, in the field, and, and getting out there and, you know, putting on a pair of hiking boots, and off you go, but what, what, there's a question of access there. And this has kind of become quite a hot topic in conservation recently, as well, along with diversity and so on. And I just, I asked myself, if people can physically get out into the field, then how do they enjoy by detecting and and how can Can I convey that experience to them? And so that was kind of a main question underpinning the project along with, you know, what, you know, it'd be nice to just do a narrative project as well and explore the narrative aspect of it, but that was kind of an underpinning thing. And so that was something I kind of went forward with, through the whole thing.

Steve Roe: 26:15

Yeah, I mean, it's really Nice idea. And I have to say when I, when you sent over the, the example track of all this is really, really well produced. Speaking of anthropogenic noise as aeroplanes is the one thing that gets me on Batchat all the time and happens, just pause for a minute, we'll have something goes over. So, you've mentioned you're missing a few species, understandably, you've said there's eight walks on the album plus the studio interlink roughly how long then is each walk. So

Mark Ferguson: 26:47

that's kind of a difficult one, I've got some walks, probably, I would say, around the 10 minute mark, and other ones might be stretching towards 20 minutes, I'd say maybe an average between sort of 10 and 15 minutes to kind of condense the material down into a sort of digestible format. But again, it was just kind of figuring out what, what the best sort of length is for people to kind of, to have. And, you know, the other issue that we're facing, at the moment more broadly, in the arts, and it sort of across the spectrum, I suppose with with podcast is attention span, because that has just dropped off off the chart, unfortunately. And you know, a lot of people particularly and younger folks, they just want something that's immediately digestible, that's immediately accessible. And if it's not interesting, it's, there's often not a lot of time given to let it sort of develop. So I just I kind of wanted to go in generally speaking, the shorter route, like making things a little bit more condensed, a little bit more accessible. You know, I have three, the project that kind of have my three and a half year old daughter in mind as well. So I kind of asked myself, well, what would she say, What would she put herself through? But what would she kind of enjoy? What would she enjoy listening to? If they kind of brought it home to you and said, you know, you know, hey, like, Would you like to check this, this sort of these bad signs out? So I've tried to keep it fairly snappy, and you know, good, fun, and just something as accessible as possible. Really?

Steve Roe: 28:22

Yeah, absolutely. And apart from regional, those people who also happen, this will encourage people to actually get out there with their detectors as well, if they're able.

Mark Ferguson: 28:30

Absolutely. And I think this is a broader thing as well. You know, we talk a lot about inspiring the younger generation of naturalists in this country and, and farther afield. And there are a lot of misconceptions about about younger folks, I think, and I'm just again, speaking as a father myself, you know, I kind of grew up with, sort of, as I mentioned to you, before we had this podcast, it's sort of this kind of weird situation of about 1/3, playing video games, 1/3 being ICT in the natural world, and 1/3 reading books. And, you know, that's kind of an interesting balance to have. And I think it's quite a healthy balance. And to be honest with you. A lot of there's a lot of misconception about screen time as well. So in terms of inspiring people to get out there, because a lot of that's actually useful. And it's I think it's a bit unfair to say that, you know, if kids or younger folks especially want to get interested in natural history, and wildlife sign recording, in ecology, whatever. There's a lot of ecology and wildlife and natural surroundings in, for example, video games. At the moment, this is something I'm looking at creatively as well as a sound artist and one of my areas of focus that was looking at how video games can be used to almost kind of construct natural environments in a concert situation. mean a lot of games that I've played in the past, have superbly rendered non natural environments. And, and, frankly, this is perhaps more unfortunate, unfortunate, they're, they're free if anthropogenic disturbance, you know, tractors and so on, unless they're supposed to be a part of the game. So they're almost sadly more pristine. And in some cases more enjoyable than the natural environments that we have. No, because a lot of them are frankly, completely polluted by by anthropogenic noise. Having said that, and maybe going off in a little bit of a tangent here. But having said that, there's a lot to be gained from recording in suburban and urban environment and this is something that bought the tech thing lends itself to and a lot of people forget this that in the wildlife sound recording community especially there's a lot of focus on getting pristine recordings and sort of effacing the Recordist and having a very objective experience portrayed to folks so with bad detecting a lot of the disturbance because you're dealing with with ultrasound is just not even that much of an issue. Of course you have other problems like interference and so on if you're tuning with the heterodyne detector, but a lot of that kind of goes away. And so most of a lot of my recordings and not just a bunch of other species that interesting ones recently have been made in in built up environments and And that's something that I find really interesting about the project, I've been able to do these explorations, particularly around my homeland back in Northern Ireland and castledawson in areas that you know, they're quite busy. But there's still a lot of story. There's a lot of humanity. And I've even on a couple of occasions in the project, I've actually encountered some people in the field, and we've talked about the project. And that kind of was very naturally, very naturally fit into the, into the framework as well. So another bonus about the typing is, it looks a bit weird when you're out at night, or in the evenings with this kind of thing in your hand, which most people think is a phone initially. And then, you know, people ask you questions about it, and you get to talk to them about, you know, how cool bats are really. And so the projects open up a lot of stuff like that,

Steve Roe: 32:07

as well. Brilliant. And we've heard snippets as you've been talking on the episodes, Mark, it sounds absolutely fantastic. Finally, where can people find it?

Mark Ferguson: 32:18

So it's going to be on Bandcamp. If you just Google walking with bots, and Bandcamp, they'll probably throw it back. If you can't get it through Bandcamp. You can go straight to my website, which is Mark Ferguson audio, all one word, Mark Ferguson, audio.com, or just Google Mark Ferguson audio, you've probably, you know, it should hopefully be available sort of be have been promoted and kind of talked about elsewhere. But those are the two main channels. So Bandcamp or you can go straight to my website, Mark Ferguson audio to get a hold of it.

Steve Roe: 32:49

And we'll put a link to both of those in the show notes. Mark, it's been fantastic talking to you. Thank you very much.

Mark Ferguson: 32:54

Greatly appreciate it. Steve, thank you.

Steve Roe: 32:57

A huge thanks to Mark for taking the time to do the interview you've just heard and for allowing us to use his clips from his new album walking with that. You can find marks album in the show notes along with links to his website and a blog. He's recently written on the BCT website. I hope you've enjoyed this instalment of series five please tell the world about Bat Chat on your social media channels. And we'll be back in two weeks time. See you then.