Late one evening in the growing dusk, I joined a small gaggle of people in the car park of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Living Seas Events Centre just outside Flamborough. 

I love a trip to the beach – as someone who grew up in a county about as far from the sea as possible, visiting the seaside is still a novelty – but I had never been to the beach at night before. The extent of my rockpooling experience was finding the occasional limpet or red blobby anemone under a rock and slipping and sliding my way over the seaweed in jelly shoes, and I had absolutely no idea what to expect once dark had fallen – if indeed anything at all.

Most of us don’t think about wildlife at night – it’s tempting to assume the world sleeps when we do. Bats are an appropriately Hallowe’en-esque nighttime visitor, and owls, moths and foxes might get an honourable mention – but there is in fact a whole world of wildlife that makes the dark its home. The height of summer, when the evenings are long and warm, is the perfect time to get out and explore some of this more elusive wildlife; and so over the series of three or four weeks, I went out on several of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s night-time wild events.

Ably assisted by Sophie, the Trust's Marine Inspiring People Officer, and her fantastic team of knowledgeable volunteers, it didn’t take us long to find some wildlife secreted away under the rocks. My track record for coming up with nothing more exciting than a limpet or two held steady for this trip, but others were much luckier – unearthing everything from edible crabs and broad-clawed porcelain crabs to dahlia anemones and the highlight of a blue European lobster. 

Having Sophie and her team with us was ideal because they could quickly identify what sort of creature we’d found lurking in the depths and offer a bit of back story. We learned all about velvet shore crabs, or devil crabs – named for their malevolent bright red eyes and habit of latching on to unsuspecting human fingers – and about chameleon prawns, which change colour depending on what colour seaweed they’ve eaten recently. Not five minutes went by without a shout over the chilly wind of ‘I’ve found something’ and we would all slip and slide our way over to peer in close – wellies were definitely a necessity for this trip!

A highlight of the trip for me was watching the world of rockpool wildlife come to life under ultraviolet light. Beadlet anemones, it transpires, look like some sort of neon party lamp of bright blue and purple rather than their usual rather dull red - and gut weed, an equally unassuming dark green, turns blood red when UV is shone on it. 

Fancy learning more about rockpools and our shoreline? Night-time seashore safaris don't start up again until autumn, but we're running plenty of extreme rockpool safaris this summer for everyone to enjoy!

Want to go it your own way? Check out Sophie's seaside advice in this brilliant video from BBC Bitesize, and remember - leave everything exactly as you found it, with all rockpool wildlife returned to its original home.

Next up on my night-time explorations was, of course, a bat walk. My closest encounter with a bat was on holiday in France, when one particularly humid evening was interrupted by what was probably a very disorientated pipistrelle appearing in through the window and being eventually captured in a lunch box. I’ve seen the occasional flit by in the darkness of something that could be a bat, but I’ve never been sure – and so a trip to North Cave Wetlands to see what delights awaited was more than overdue. 

The Trust runs bat walks throughout the summer, as bats are best spotted at night between April and October. North Cave Wetlands is just one of the reserves where you can go truly batty – alongside Spurn and Flamborough on the coast – but with its mixture of old farm buildings, small patches of woodland and large, open pools it truly has plenty to offer. 

This time expertly accompanied by Carmen, the Trust's Inspiring People Officer for the Humber, we set off in search of bats armed with little box-like detectors. Bat detectors work by picking up the frequency bats use to ecolocate, which is at a pitch indistinguishable by humans - between 45 and 65khz, in comparison to the human auditory range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Humans can sometimes hear the social noises bats make, particularly young children - which sound like squealing or clicking.

You can distinguish different bats by the rhythm their ecolocation calls make on the bat detector. Carmen was an expert of this, easily identifying our two bats of the night - common pipistrelle and soprano pipistrelle - both of which sounded amusingly like wet slapping or popping. We didn't have to wait long to hear bats whizzing overhead - and the particularly eagle-eyed amongst the group also managed to spot some dark shapes in the night!

My final adventure was on one of the Trust's most enduringly popular wildlife trips. Our glow worm walks sell out every year - and indeed are sold out this year! - attracting visitors from as far as Newcastle and Nottingham. 

Most people don't realise that glow worms can be found in the UK. In Yorkshire, they are found on the very particular belt of magnesian limestone that runs its way in a narrow strip from north to south across the country - and more specifically, they are found at our Townsclose Hills nature reserve in Kippax. Historically their range would have been much wider, and our reserve officers are surveying others sites nearby to work out whether glow worms could one day return to light up more of our nature reserves.

I admit to being a little skeptical when Elspeth, our guide, told us glow worms would be easily visible. Initially I had American fireflies in mind, those great glowing swarms of flying beetles - but when Elspeth explained that only male UK glow worms can fly (and aren't even worms, and only the females glow) my expectations for the 'glowing' part were reduced to the sort of light you get from glow-in-the-dark stickers.

In fact, just twenty minutes into our walk I turned to ask Elspeth why someone was shining a green laser pointer at the floor up ahead - and realised we'd found our first glow worm. They really are astonishingly bright - particularly at the start of their two weeks as adults, when they still have all of their energy. 

This bright light was visible from several feet away! 

Glow worm larvae have one job during the first few years of their life, and that is to eat. This job is vitally important because when they turn into glowing beetles, they lose their ability to eat - and so must expend all the energy they've built up in glowing brightly to attract a mate.

Female glow worms are a lot bigger than male glow worms, and sit on grass stalks so that they can expose their glowing organs. Male glow worms fly about looking for the light - and once they've found it they land at the base of the grass stalk and climb up to mate. This is so tiring for them that the female glow worm has to carry them back down afterwards - so part of Elspeth's surveying work is to count the number of males attached to the female glow worm. 

Up close, you can see how beetle-like glow worms really are! (Please be aware that this glow worm was perched on a rock - we do not advocate picking glow worms up!)

Over the course of the evening we found eight glow worms, which bodes well for the health of the glow worm population at Townsclose Hills.

Searching for glow worms was definitely the best way to round up a fantastic suite of night-time adventures, and I can't wait to see where my exploration of Yorkshire's wildlife takes me next. Be sure to check out our events pages to find out information on what's coming up where - and your next wild spectacle!