136 VESPERTILIONID.E— VESPERTILIO 



somewhat delicate animal, not daring, as a rule, to venture 

 abroad except when the weather is fine, and seeking the shelter 

 of gardens and orchards, roads or lanes, where it appears in 

 the same haunts from year to year. Its flight is described as 

 low and heavy, and it often flutters with fully expanded wings 

 in manner resembling the members of the genus Myotis. 



I am indebted to Captain Saville J. Reid for enabling 

 me to arrive at a partial understanding of this apparent con- 

 fusion. In the grounds of his house at Yalding, Kent, he has 

 long known the Serotine to haunt the lawns and open spaces 

 between the fruit-trees. Here, in the early summer months, 

 a party of ten or twenty of them may be seen circling and 

 twisting round the trees in pursuit of the buzzing cockchafers, 

 which they catch and devour on the wing. Captain Reid's 

 experience early in the year thus bears out the descriptions 

 of those writers who find this bat a sociable, low-flying, glade- 

 haunting species, but he has not observed it actually snatching 

 the insects off the trees, as other writers assert that it does.^ 



On 28th July, when I joined, Captain Reid in watching 

 the bats, there were no cockchafers on the wing, and the 

 Serotines, of which there were then only some half-dozen in 

 view, had perforce to look for other food. They now flew 

 higher, often at thirty or forty feet, but not, I think, 

 exceeding the height of tall elms or of gunshot, and 

 often descending near to the ground. Their flight was 

 not unlike that of the Pipistrelle, but their beat was wider 

 and their pace relatively less rapid. They could not be 

 described as weak flyers, nor was their pace slow, but they 

 clearly lacked the dash and finish of the Noctule, one or 

 two of which were present for comparison. 



Like other bats, they indulged in frequent swoops and 

 somersaults, evidently in the act of seizing their prey, but 

 the only one heard to utter a sound was a large one, which 

 Mr H. C. Schwann shot to test our identification, and which 

 shrieked before it fell dead to the ground. 



To the above notes may be added the information kindly 

 supplied by the Rev. E. N. Bloomfield, of Guestling Rectory, 



' E.g., Blasius in Germany, Borrer and Bond in England ; see Zoologist, 1891, 

 203. 



