So the other day I got to stroke a live pipistrelle. In the adjacent photo, Mike Pawling (chairman of the Hampshire Bats Group) is holding the bat; Vicki is touching the bat's back. Mike and his wife Chris hold permits and everything, and they take care of rescued bats that have been found injured, or have been dropped by their mothers. Pipistrelles are certainly Britain's - and probably Europe's - most abundant bat; they are highly adaptable little bats (part of the vesper bat group, or Vespertilionidae) that inhabit cities and suburbs as well as woodlands and other places. Here are just a few words about them. They are tiny, weighing 3.5-8.5 g and with a wingspan of 18-25 cm. They become territorial when insect prey becomes scare, defending food patches and warning off other bats with calls and by chasing. During late summer and autumn, males defend mating roosts from one another, and perform songflights while doing an elliptical skirt of the roost: they might attract more than ten females in a night. They don't form the massive swarms that cave-dwelling vesper bats do (Altringham 2003). Few outside of bat research know that bats sing, swarm, or defend territories, so I always like telling people about these things.
Everyone interested in bats (and in European mammals in general) knows that the species previously known as Pipistrellus pipistrellus has turned out to be two species: because the two were first distinguished by way of their different echolocation frequencies, they are known informally as 45 and 55 kHz pipistrelles. It was later discovered that the two differ in genetics, morphology and behaviour (Barlow et al. 1997, Davidson-Watts & Jones 2006). It is possible to distinguish them morphologically when they're in the hand, but it's not easy: the 45 has a darker face and darker fur and a proportionally longer snout than the 55. The 45 is also commoner. I think the bats shown here are 45s, but I'm not sure of course. As I explained in a ver 1 article on 'new' European mammals (here), the 45 pipistrelle is P. pipistellus (Schreber, 1774) while the 55 pipistrelle is P. pygmaeus Leach, 1825, so there aren't really any 'new' species here, just a long-overlooked one.
The next time I have spare money I'm joining a local bat group.
For previous articles on European bats see Greater noctules: specialist predators of migrating passerines (here). I'm pleased to say that I've also covered vampires, ghost bats, New Zealand's short-tailed bats, and the bat diphyly debate. Coverage isn't quite complete, but I'm getting there :)
Refs - -
Altringham, J. D. 2003. British Bats. HarperCollins, London.
Barlow, K. E., Jones, G. & Barratt, E. M. 1997. Can skull morphology be used to predict ecological relationships between bat species? A test using two cryptic species of pipistrelle. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 264, 1695-1700.
Davidson-Watts, I. & Jones, G. 2005. Differences in foraging behaviour between Pipistrellus pipistrellus (Schreber, 1774) and Pipistrellus pygmaeus (Leach, 1825). Journal of Zoology 268, 55-62.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The next time I have spare money I'm joining a local bat group.
In the meantime, you could try making your own batometer.
How adorable...
Here in Texas, we don't pet bats mostly, due to fear of rabies. I know that rabies does not occur in Britain due to stringent quarantine. Bats being winged, though, do they fly back and forth from the Continent, possibly bringing fun new diseases as they go?
Supposedly, we have "little brown bats" up here in the basements and attics of Anchorage. I've never seen one, but enough people have told me they HAVE that I assume it's true. I would very much like to go bat-hunting, and maybe even catch one of the little flying furballs, but I have not yet had the opportunity. Bats are among my very favorite modern mammals, though.
"The next time I have spare money I'm joining a local bat group."
What does it cost to join a bat group and why?
I helped out with some bat-banding research as an undergrad, and found them very appealing little creatures. A lot of people are terrified that a bat might bite them, but little guys like the pipistrelles have tiny jaws and teeth small enough that they can't really bite humans very effectively -- about the worst they can do is latch onto a fold of loose skin on the back of your knuckle and chew on it for awhile, which pinches. I've never seen one draw blood on a human. We saw lots and lots of pipistrelles in the midwestern US, along with Little Browns and Indiana bats (Myotis sodalis, now endangered, alas) which are quite pretty.
The Big Brown Bat (Eptesicus) is another story -- still only a couple of inches long, but big enough to draw blood if it bites you. The various Hoary Bats (Lasiurus and relatives) we saw were generally too laid-back to bite much and could get quite friendly with a little hand-feeding. One of our folks used to take a pet Lasiurus to class inside his shirt pocket, where it was quite happy snoozing upside-down with its toes hooked over the edge :) Tres cute.
Bats are not evil nasty creatures and don't bite unless they feel threatened, and wearing leather gloves seems to be ample protection for most of the common sorts in the temperate zone. And no, bats do not get tangled in people's hair -- their echolocation is plenty good enough to avoid it :)
I'm not familiar with the western pips, but the eastern ones are now Perimyotis subflavus, moved from the genus Pipistrellus. My bat buddies and I kind of lamented that change, "eastern peri" just doesn't have the same cute ring to it as "eastern pip"...;) I actually just caught a few of these guys this weekend, they are really nice bats, much less fiesty than many other species.
Thank you for posting those! They have to be among the most charming small-mamal images I have seen since ... since I looked at the Shrewist site and saw their photo of a shrew perched on top of an immense dome that looked disturbingly like a thumb!
Sorry, when referring to a WWWebsite, I ought to provide the URL as a reference:
http://members.chello.at/natura/shrew/index.html
DRK wrote...
Yes, bats of various species do cross both the North Sea and English Channel. One species - Nathusius' pipistrelle P. nathusii - might be expanding its range by migrating into Britain, as more colonies and more individuals are being recorded now than before. Two of the lyssavirus genotypes that cause rabies, EBLV-1 and 2, have proved widespread and endemic in European bats, particularly in serotines and some Myotis species. Consequently people who handle bats are advised to seek immunisation, and, in Denmark, people whose houses are inhabited by serotines are advised to get their dogs vaccinated. Only a few people have contracted rabies from bats in Europe: there are some poorly-documented cases from the former Yugoslavia, Turkey and the former USSR, a 1985 case from Switzerland, and a more recent case from Denmark.
In 1986 a pregnant woman in Newhaven, Sussex (UK), picked up a Daubenton's bat and was bitten: the bat proved to be carrying EBLV-2, but the lady was immunised and both she and her baby were fine. In Lancashire, in 2002, another Daubenton's bat carrying EBLV-2 bit a bat rehabilitator. This bat was a juvenile and had been born in the UK, so it now seems that EBLV-2 is endemic to Britain. Other British Daubenton's bats have since proved to be carriers of EBLV-2. Also in 2002, a bat enthusiast working for Scottish Natural Heritage developed rabies symptoms and later died.
We clearly need to be cautious about rabies in Britain, and some workers recommend that those coming into contact with bats should receive pre-exposure immunisation.
Most of the information here is taken from Racey & Fooks (2005).
Refs - -
Racey, P. & Fooks, A. 2005. Rabies in bats in Britain. Biologist 52 (1), 34-38.
On joining local bat groups, Mike from Ottawa asked...
What does it cost: for the local group where I live (Hampshire, UK), annual membership is about 8 quid: that's about 16 dollars. That's fairly representative of things in the UK, but I have no idea about North America of course.
Why join: I do everything I can to get hands-on practical experience with animals. If you join a bat group you can participate in surveys, do recording work, and get out in the field and experience wild bats! To date, my only experiences have been fortuitous. You're also providing funds for local conservation, rehabilitation etc.
Spix's Disk-Winged Bats are among my favorites, although it's been difficult finding information on the bats of Madagascar that also have developed sucker-disks.
When I was a kid, my best friend called me to hurry to her house because there was "a baby squirrel" in the street. When I arrived, I found a baby bat, its body no larger than my last thumb joint.
I picked it up and cradled it. Folks, it had the softest fur of any animal I have ever stroked, and when I leaned down to listen to it, its voice was exactly the sound of glass wind chimes. So for me, bats became a favourite animal, and it was a treat decades later to read the "Silverwing" series of stories by Kenneth Oppel.
I took it home, kept it warm, and tried without success to feed it watered milk with a few drops of honey. Sadly but predictably, it died before morning.
Noni
We clearly need to be cautious about rabies in Britain, and some workers recommend that those coming into contact with bats should receive pre-exposure immunisation.
Amen to that. The rule in our research group was that either you took the pre-exposure immunization or you handled all bats with gloves. Handling bats the size of most Myotis with gloves on is so awkward that most of us opted for the shots, even though at the time it was essentially the same 14 rather uncomfortable shots as the post-exposure regime. (Insert "yes, and we walked uphill both ways to school in the snow" old-timer's complaint here {grin})
At the time, I recall hearing that in bats, especially when hibernating (we did most of our research in winter), most of the time the rabies virus is dormant and contained in the "brown fat" between the shoulder blades, which is why the risk of rabies from bat bites is significantly lower than, say, from rodent bites (since we do have endemic rabies in the US). Is that still the current thought?
I've just PayPal-ed a tenner into your bat group membership fund. No more excuses - join!
I've spent many happy twilights this summer standing on my lawn with the local bats fluttering around me. It's utterly magical. Managed to photograph one last weekend. It's not a particularly good photo, but it was better than I expected:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gruts/1491566214/
Any idea what species it is? Impossible to tell from that photo, no doubt. I had assumed pipistrelle. The photo was taken in Yorkshire.
Richard - your photo is pretty good. The colour of your bat made me think at first that it might be a noctule (which is our largest bat - it can have a wingspan of 45 cm and might weigh as much as 50 g), but its wings aren't long enough for that. On balance, yes, I suppose it's a pipistrelle.
Zach Miller, just necroposting to let you know that I live in Kodiak and I have seen a little brown bat up close. One somehow got into a vase in my house. Its panicked cries sounded like a 1:12 scale shopping cart with a squeaky wheel. (Being stuck in that vase must've been aural hell for the poor little thing.) I was able to put a towel over the vase, take the whole thing to the front door, then upend the vase to deposit the bat on the towel. I let it sit on the towel on my lap until it got its bearings and zipped away at incredible speed.
I didn't try to touch it, but I can say that I have never seen anything that exquisite on such a scale. Its bones were as fine as wires, the lentil-colored skin of its wings thinner than I had thought possible, but it was full of life. I could feel the heat radiating from it inches away. It had an intricately folded little black face and the most alert tiny eyes. Its fragment of a tongue stuck out from between its teeth as it panted. Its fur was the exact color of ganache and glossy as an otter's. I really wanted to stroke it, but I was afraid of panicking it into cardiac arrest or else catching something. I could have watched it for another hour. I hope it was okay.