Embrace the dark side- but take someone with you who knows where to find it!

Scene: 30 otherwise sane adults shuffling round a field at night somewhere in deepest Essex, bending double to peer under leaves and into bushes....about half of them are also waving around small black boxes which regularly emit loud squarking noises. Is it a secret Essex midsummer ritual? Are they hoping to summon aliens? Are they just simply lunatics? No! It's the annual EWT glow-worm survey -combined with a quick bit of bat spotting courtesy of a nice lady from the Essex Bat Group. She arrived with a whole box of bat detectors and entertained us with a bat quiz while we waited for it to get dark enough to see the glow-worms.
The bat detectors bring a whole new dimension to the dark...there is such a lot going on up there, though it was rather alarming to be told that the detectors can also detect nylon! What is nylon emitting for?? And why are people trying to detect it?? Anyway amongst other interesting facts we learnt that some bat species are defined solely by frequency. So whizzing about in the air above the field were 45mhz- pipistrelles and 55mhz pipistrelles (presumably they don't mate because they don't like each other's accents) though there is also a 52.5 mkz pipistrelle which makes one wonder if mixed mhz marriages are taking place.
Oh and the glow-worms? We found 5 in the end- tiny green bright lightbulbs shining out from the undergrowth and not wormy at all, small nondescript female beetles clinging to stems. They just light up and wait apparently, and hope for love to drop out of the sky. They are getting rarer and one theory is that the poor males can't see them amongst all the other lights around. One imagines poor desperate glowworms mating with fairy lights on porches or something.
Actually I realised this trip was in fine old family tradition of night-time expeditions. Remember Hainault golf course? (comets and meteor showers?) and Harlow park in the dark for the comet (again); the middle of a field on holiday once to see the Milky Way? Epping Forest for roding Woodcock (twice), Northward Hill for Nightingales, Lee Valley for a planetary line up (and nightingales - extra bonus!), Lyme Regis for New Year storms.......Norway for the Aurora Borealis....?