THE NOGTULE 



THERE are perhaps no animals which are less 

 studied by scientific men than bats, and conse- 

 quently there is little cause for surprise that popular ideas 

 about these creatures are so erroneous. There are many 

 educated men and women who do not know whether a bat 

 is a mammal or a bird, and a man once asked me if it was 

 not " a kind of insect.' 1 Even expert zoologists often 

 confess that they cannot distinguish between the com- 

 moner species, and lamentably little is known about the 

 distribution and habits, though bats occur in nearly every 

 part of the British Isles. 



Daubenton first described the noctule, or great bat, 

 but it was Gilbert White who identified it as an inhabitant 

 of Britain. He called it Vespertilio altivolans " from its 

 manner of flying high in the air," a characteristic which, 

 though by no means invariable, is very useful as a means 

 of identification. The noctule is the largest British bat, 

 considerably bigger than its near relative, Leisler's bat, 

 and slightly exceeding the greater horseshoe and serotine. 

 The evidence of the occurrence of the mouse-coloured 

 bat, V. murinus, in England is so slender that it cannot 

 be accepted as a native. The name V. murinus was for 

 long applied to the " common bat," the pipistrelle, show- 

 ing how little intercourse existed in the early part of last 

 century between the British and continental naturalists, 

 for the mouse- coloured bat was well known then as the 

 common bat of the Continent. It is strange that there 

 should have been confusion between animals that varied 

 so much in size as this bat and our little pipistrelle. The 



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