208 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



huge moths by leaping trout, as they approach the 

 water to drink. 



Bats also feed twice a day at regular periods, once 

 at sundown and once at sunrise, always capturing 

 and eating their insect food on the wing. Some of 

 them have a curious habit of using a pouch, which is 

 made of the membrane stretched between their hind 

 legs, as a kind of net to hold the captured insect until 

 it can be firmly gripped and eaten. In this same pouch 

 the young are carried as soon as they are born, and 

 until they are strong enough to nurse. After that, 

 like young jumping mice, they cling to the teats of 

 the mother bat, and are carried everywhere in this 

 way. When they get too large to be so conveyed in 

 comfort, the mother bat hangs them up in some 

 secret place until her return. 



Moreover a mother bat is just as devoted to her 

 babies as any other mammal. She takes entire 

 charge of them, with never any help from the 

 father bat. Young bats are blind at birth, but 

 their eyes open on the fifth day, and on the thirteenth 

 day the baby bat no longer clings to its mother, 

 but roosts beside her. The bat has from two to four 

 young, depending on the species. Most young bats 

 can fly and forage for themselves when they are about 

 three months old, although the silvery bat begins to 

 fly when it is three weeks old. No bat makes a nest. 



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, 



