Little Brown Bat 



a bat " seem applicable when you caught the gleam and sparkle 

 of his wicked little eyes, peering out from beneath his woolly 

 eyebrows. He evidently decided that he had chosen an unsafe 

 sleeping place, and tor a little while the window was deserted; 

 but in a few days 1 noticed a smaller specimen of his race in the 

 opposite corner, and the day following there were nine of varying 

 size ranged along the upper sash in their usual characteristic atti- 

 tudes. One near the middle of the row was wide awake; washing 

 himself after the manner of a cat, he would lick his foot or a 

 portion of his wing and rub his head with it the wrong way of 

 the fur, and scratch himself rapidly behind the ear with one of 

 his little thumb nails at the bend of his wing, the long bone of 

 his fore-arm beating a tattoo on the glass beside him as he did 

 so. The elasticity of the wing membrane is truly astonishing; he 

 would seize an edge of it in his mouth and stretch it into all 

 kinds of grotesque shapes in his endeavour to get it clean enough 

 to suit his fancy, and sometimes, when at work on the inside, he 

 would wrap his head up in it entirely, the thin rubbery stuff con- 

 forming to the general outline of his skull in the most startling 

 manner. 



Judging from those in the window, it would appear that bats 

 are not given to occupying the same roosting places with any 

 great degree of regularity, but spend the night chasing insects 

 wherever these are to be found in great abundance, and hang 

 themselves up to sleep where daylight happens to catch them. I 

 kept an exact account of the number sleeping in the window 

 during the month of August of the year 1898, beginning with the 

 first Saturday, and soon noticed that for some inexplicable reason 

 they were given to congrtgating there on Sunday nights, and that 

 their numbers usually fell off until the middle of the week, and 

 then increased again until Sunday. Here are their numbers as I 

 set them down each day on my calendar: Saturday, 4; Sunday, 16; 

 Monday, 9; Tuesday, 4; Wednesday, 2; Thursday, 5; Friday, 10; 

 Saturday, 10; Sunday, 18; Monday, 10; Tuesday, 2; Wednesday, o; 

 Thursday, o; Friday, i; Saturday, i. The third Sunday I was 

 away, and so failed to take account of them, but on Monday 

 there were 3, and 2 on Tuesday. For the next three days the 

 window was unoccupied, Saturday I found i, Sunday 2 and Mon- 

 day 3, after which they abandoned the window almost entirely, 

 though I occasionally found a solitary specimen snuggled in one 



199 



