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THE HABITS OF THE GREATER HORSE-SHOE BAT. 



Rev. H. 'A. MACPHERSON, M.A., 



Alember of the British Ornithologists Union; Joint-Author of the 

 ' Birds of Cumberland.' 



Considering the number of field naturalists at work at home, it is 

 to be regretted that our knowledge of the distribution of our Bats 

 has made little or no advance in the last ten years. Even that 

 admirable granary of facts, the Zoologist, has taught us little or 

 nothing about Bats of late years, and other periodicals present a 

 similar blank of information. Exception must, of course, be taken 

 as to Yorkshire, in which the distribution of British mammals has 

 been traced with such admirable exactness by Mr. Roebuck ; as to 

 almost all the other counties, our ignorance exceeds our knowledge. 

 In Cumberland, some six species of Bats have been obtained, the 

 most interesting being the Barbastelle. It has not, indeed, come 

 under the writer's notice in his county ; but he lately examined, in 

 the collection of Mr. Bond, two examples of the Barbastelle, obtained 

 at Carlisle by the late Mr. T. C. Heysham. The object of the 

 present paper is to embody some interesting observations on a 

 somewhat rare species, the Greater Horse-shoe Bat, as observed in 

 Devonshire. The writer having recently advertised for live Bats, Mr. 



Mitchell, of X , in Devonshire, offered to supply him with some 



* Lesser Horse-shoe Bats ' ; but the species intended proved to be 

 the rarer Greater Horse-shoe. 



In a note of August 14th, Mr. Mitchell remarked, ' I generally 

 get the Horse-shoe Bats in some large caves, a few miles distant.' 

 On the 17th he wrote, ' I am sorry to keep you so long waiting for 

 the Bats ; I went to the caves yesterday, but although I was in them 

 for nearly three hours, I only succeeded in catching two, and one of 

 these was so badly hurt, having its wing broken in capture, that I 

 was obliged to kill it. The other is doing well, and sleeps com- 

 fortably all day, only feeding in the evening. I am going down to 

 the caves again to-morrow ; they are situated close to the river 



Y . I hope to secure half a dozen more. The only reason that 



I can assign for my failure to obtain more specimens yesterday is 

 that a great many visitors have been to see the caves lately, and I 

 fancy that their noise and the lights which they carried must have 

 disturbed the Bats. Early in the spring I could go down and pick 

 off as many as I could carry away, since they were not in the least 

 frightened, and would permit me to take them down from where they 

 were hanging with scarcely a movement ; whereas now, as soon as I 

 entered the cave they began to fly from one part of the cave to the 



Nov. 1886. z 



