Hunters and Hunted 



spend practically all their waking hours in the pursuit of 

 prey. As the victims are solely members of the insect 

 world, most of them guilty of harming mankind or his 

 crops, the bats can only be considered as useful beasts. 

 As with all animals which capture their prey upon the 

 wing, bats have exceedingly large mouths. Swifts, 

 swallows and nightjars are similarly armed. Their sense 

 of hearing is acute, and in most of them the ear-flaps are 

 enormously developed to form sound-boxes which, so it 

 is said, enable their owners to hear moths and other 

 insects flying abroad. Their sight is poor ; in fact they 

 place no reliance upon this sense when in pursuit of their 

 prey. 



On the other hand, the bat's sense of touch is developed 

 to such a pitch that it is almost beyond our powers of 

 comprehension. An experiment has been performed in 

 which a bat's eyes were covered with sticking plaster, 

 after which the animal was liberated in a room from the 

 ceiling of which a large number of threads were suspended. 

 This bat flew round and round the room without even so 

 much as touching one of the threads. Prey can also be 

 caught without the use of the eyes, the highly developed 

 sense of touch alone sufficing for the detection of the 

 feeble air vibrations of a flying insect. 



Glutton though the bat may be, he is no match for the 

 mole, who daily consumes food equal to the weight of his 

 own body, and should that food not be exactly to his 

 requirements he has been known to eat four times the 

 weight of his own body to compensate for its unsuita- 

 bility. The prey of this little creature consists of earth- 

 worms, cockchafer grubs and the like ; all his victims 

 dwell underground, therefore keen sight is useless to the 

 little hunter. His sense of smell, touch by means of his 

 snout and hearing are remarkably acute. In autumn 

 the mole lays up a large store of food for the winter in 

 the shape of earthworms as much as six pounds' weight 

 of these luckless creatures has been found in a mole 



195 



