Whitaker: Notes on ihe Breeding Habits of Bats. V7 
informed me of a colony of bats that occupied the roof of his 
cottage, which was situated in the middle of the forest, and to 
which I arranged to pay a visit that evening. 
Arriving there about half-an-hour before dusk, I was some- 
what disappointed to find that, although the roof was evidently 
inhabited by a very large colony of bats, as their squeakings 
plainly testified, the fact that it was an old tiled roof, affording 
numberless openings for the egress of its occupants, would 
inevitably prevent me from securing many specimens with the 
single small butterfly net, which was all I had to capture 
them with. . On the keeper’s advice, I decided to try the back 
slope of the roof, from which he said most of the bats emerged, 
but I was again disappointed to find that the only available 
ladder was so short that I had to stand on its topmost rung 
(which necessitated my holding on to the spout with one hand) 
in order to reach to the roof; in addition to this, I had to 
splice my net to a broom handle before it would reach to the 
exit holes, which were all in the vicinity of the ridge. On the 
whole, under these adverse eircumstances, | was not at all 
surprised at only securing three specimens, which were all that 
emerged from the hole I had elected to guard. From other 
holes in the roof the bats, which were all small in size, came 
pouring in little streams, from about fifteen minutes after sun- 
set to some three quarters of an hour later, but for long after 
that time the noisy squeaking proceeding from the inside of the 
roof proclaimed the fact that some individuals had not come 
out. Apparently they had no intention of doing so, for I heard 
them squeaking inside fully an hour and a half after the bats had 
quite ceased to issue from the roof. If I were to make a guess 
at the strength of the colony, I should put it down at between 
three and four hundred, and I think the bats were probably all 
Pipistrelles ; certainly most of them were. The three specimens 
I obtained were all females of this species. 
The following day I returned to Yorkshire, and, owing to an 
unfortunate accident, the label got scrubbed off the trunk in 
which these bats were packed, and the box was consequently 
missing when I reached Sheffield. That was on the Friday 
afternoon. In spite of the fact that every effort was made to 
recover the box, I did not receive it until the following Wednes- 
day evening, and I was consequently not at all surprised to find 
the bats in the last stage of exhaustion. One or two Whiskered 
Bats, which I had also obtained in the Forest, were, in fact, 
dead on arrival, and although the three Pipistrelles lived for a 
1907 March 1. 
