290 THE GREAT NORTH-WEST 



any swans, though I heard that a few had been shot 

 within a few miles of the farm. 



Bats were very plentiful about the barns and the 

 house itself, passing to and fro to the trees of the forest. 

 There were at least five species, of which I can name 

 with certainty the long- eared bat, Plecotus macrotis, which 

 does not seem to differ materially from the long-eared bat 

 of the British Isles, P. auritus ; the silver-haired bat, Ves- 

 perugo noctivagans ; and the brown bat, Vespertilio subulatus. 

 The last, which is a very small animal, was by far the 

 most numerous, but the silver-haired bat was the one 

 about which I learned most. It is brown in colour, but 

 the longer hairs towards the base of the back are tipped 

 with white, hence the name. But it is a misnomer, as the 

 creature cannot be truly called silver haired, and the name 

 is probably only applied as a distinction. There are a 

 couple of white spots at the sides of the head, and a 

 portion of the membrane by which it flies is hairy, a 

 rather unusual circumstance. It is, on the whole, a 

 handsome bat, and tolerably plentiful in this region. 



I was attracted to it by seeing it hawking over the 

 meadows, which were infested by the kitty-dads, where it 

 appeared before sunset, skimming close to the ground. 

 I have noticed in other parts of the continent that the 

 silver-haired bat comes forth very early in the evening if 

 prey is abundant. I have no doubt that on this occasion 

 it was the grasshoppers that the bat was in pursuit of, 

 but I could not verify the supposition. I traced the bats 

 to a hollow tree, just within a clump of forest that bor- 

 dered on the farm, less than half a mile from the house, 

 and, going thither with a ladder in the middle of the day, 

 found their colony about forty feet above the ground. 

 The number of bats was considerable ; but as the hollow 

 was extensive, running up and down the tree, I could only 

 see and disturb a portion of them. Probably there were 

 from two to three hundred in this one colony. 



The cries they uttered on being disturbed were very 

 faint, as they are when the bat is on the wing. It is a 



