THE SEVEN SLEEPERS 211 
it begins to hunt, which varies only with the light. 
When the big brown bat starts, the twilight has 
almost turned to dark. 
The two kinds of little brown bat, Leconte’s and 
Say’s, cannot be told apart in flight. Both of them 
are much smaller than the big brown bat, and the 
ear of a Leconte’s bat barely reaches the end of the 
nose, while that of a Say’s bat is considerably longer. 
All bats have large ears, each of which contains a 
curious inner ear known as the “‘antitragus.”” Both 
of these little bats are country bats and prefer caves 
and hollow trees to houses and outbuildings. 
The black bat can be told from all other American 
bats by its deep black-brown color touched with 
silvery white. This bat likes to hunt and hawk over 
water, skimming across ponds like swallows. Some 
of the black-bat colonies, or “‘batteries,”’ are very 
large, one by actual count including 9,640 bats. 
Next comes the Georgia pigmy bat, so called to 
distinguish it from the very rare New York pigmy 
bat. This little bat can be told by its small size, for 
it is the smallest of all of our eastern bats, by its 
yellowish pale color, and especially by its flight, 
which is weak and fluttering, like that of a large 
butterfly. 
The red bat is a tree bat, spending the daytime in 
the foliage of trees, and rarely, if ever, being found in 
caves or houses. It can be told at a glance by its red 
color. It is the greatest of all the bats except the last, 
the hoary bat, the largest of them all, with a wing- 
spread of from fifteen to seventeen inches. This 
