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, 
