I’ve got a recording on my phone from 23 December 2014. It’s called ‘Bats, Wright’, and listening to it I can still see the scene when I recorded it.

It was late at night and I was standing under a bright street light that rose like a four-leaf clover from the centre of a roundabout just a few blocks from my parents’ house in one of the new suburbs of Canberra. I was listening with my bat detector to the microbats that were flitting in and out of the arc of the light’s glow, feasting on the thousands of beetles drawn to that same light. The beetles writhed on their backs on the gravel of the roundabout, clambered over the empty road, rattled and thunked against the steel and glass of the lights and whirred as they flew laboriously through the night air. Bats of maybe half-a-dozen species gorged themselves. Walking back to the house I skirted past kangaroos munching contentedly on the nature-strips, hunched behind parked cars. It was a Christmas bounty of wildlife.