Titian Peale, of Philadelphia, in an early natural history, tells a story of a boy who, in 1823, caught a young red bat and took it home. Three hours later, in the evening, he started to take it to the museum, carrying it in his hand. As he passed near the place where it was caught, the mother bat appeared and followed the boy for two squares, flying around him and finally lighting on his breast, until the boy allowed her to take charge of her little one.
The bat has but few enemies. They are occasionally caught by owls, probably taken unawares or when hanging in some dark tree. In fact, virtually the only enemies a bat has are fur-lice, which breed upon them in enormous quantities. It is this misfortune, and the fact that a bat has a strong rank smell like that of a skunk, which keep it from being popular as a pet.
A friend of mine once, however, kept a little brown bat, which had been drowned out from a tree by a thunder-storm, for a long time under a sieve as a pet. The bat became tame and would accept food, and it was most interesting to see the deft, speedy way in which he husked millers and other minute insects, rejecting their wings, skinning their bodies, and devouring the flesh only after it had been prepared entirely to its liking. He would wash himself with his tongue and his paw, like a cat, using the little thumb-nail at the bend of his wing, and stretching the rubbery membrane into all kinds of shapes, until it seemed as if he would tear it in his zeal for cleanliness.
A bat always alights first by catching the little hooks on its wings. As soon as it has a firm grip with these, it at once turns over, head downward, and hangs by the long, recurved nails of the hind feet, and in this position sleeps through the daylight. It sleeps through the winter in the top of some warm steeple or, far more often than we suspect, in dark corners of our houses, and sometimes in hollow trees and deserted buildings and caves. Only when caught by the cold does the bat hibernate. Often it migrates like the birds.
One of the strangest things about the flittermouse is its voice. It is a penetrating, shrill squeak, so high that many people cannot hear it at all. The chirp of a sparrow is about five octaves above the middle E of the piano, while the cry of the bat is a full octave above that. In England there is a saying that no person more than forty years old can hear the cry of a bat. This is founded probably on the fact that the ears of many of us, especially as we approach middle age, are unable to distinguish sounds more than four octaves above middle E. Some naturalists believe that the shrill squeak which most of us do hear is only one of many notes of the bat, and that the various species have different calls, like those of birds, and probably even have a love-song during the mating season, in late August or early September, which can never be heard by human ears.
Most bats found in the Eastern States are either large brown house-bats, one of two kinds of little brown bats, black bats, red or tree bats, pigmy bats, or, last, largest and most beautiful of all, hoary bats. The big brown bat, or house-bat, is the commonest. This is the last of the bats to come out in the evening, for each has a certain fixed hour when it begins to hunt, which varies only with the light. When the big brown bat starts, the twilight has almost turned to dark.
The two kinds of little brown bat, Leconte’s and Say’s, cannot be told apart in flight. Both of them are much smaller than the big brown bat, and the ear of a Leconte’s bat barely reaches the end of the nose, while that of a Say’s bat is considerably longer. All bats have large ears, each of which contains a curious inner ear known as the “antitragus.” Both of these little bats are country bats and prefer caves and hollow trees to houses and outbuildings.
The black bat can be told from all other American bats by its deep black-brown color touched with silvery white. This bat likes to hunt and hawk over water, skimming across ponds like swallows. Some of the black-bat colonies, or “batteries,” are very large, one by actual count including 9,640 bats.
Next comes the Georgia pigmy bat, so called to distinguish it from the very rare New York pigmy bat. This little bat can be told by its small size, for it is the smallest of all of our eastern bats, by its yellowish pale color, and especially by its flight, which is weak and fluttering, like that of a large butterfly.
The red bat is a tree bat, spending the daytime in the foliage of trees, and rarely, if ever, being found in caves or houses. It can be told at a glance by its red color. It is the greatest of all the bats except the last, the hoary bat, the largest of them all, with a wing-spread of from fifteen to seventeen inches. This great bat soars high, well above the tree-tops, where it can prey upon the high-flying great moths. It is one of the most beautiful, as well as the rarest, of our bats, being found in the East only in the spring or fall migration. It wears a magnificent furry coat as beautiful as that of the silver fox, but, like all of its race, it is cursed with the homeliest face ever worn by an animal. It is this hobgoblin face which, in spite of a blameless life and useful habits, makes the flittermouse, whatever its species, universally hated.