112 
JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY 
rumors, which may or may not be so, of roosts of this species having 
been found but a few feet above the ground, and it is undeniably true 
that many single animals have been secured while hanging at a low 
elevation, but all five locations from which I have secured them, be- 
sides a roost “belonging” to L. E. Wyman, have been so situated that 
the bats had an uninterrupted drop of at least twenty feet before taking 
wing. I am so sure of the necessity of this point that I would not 
think of searching for them where this condition did not obtain. In 
the aggregate, I have spent hours studjdng dozens of individuals in my 
screened porch and trying to make them fly, but whether in January 
or during the heat of June, they all refused even to flutter their wings 
when dropped from as high as I could reach while standing upon a chair, 
although they were exceedingly lively and scrambled about the floor 
with the greatest celerity. I have even, at different times, caught 
thirty individuals which Little dropped to me from at least thirty feet 
above, and although they spread their wings so as to break their falls, 
not one tried to fly; and this on sunny and fairly warm days. Last 
spring, one entered the open window of a vacant room, alighted on a lace 
curtain and finally died — evidently because it could not leave with so 
httle “take-off.” I found one dead beneath the eaves of my cow shed, 
and another on the floor of a low building. I discovered about eighteen 
which had died in an attic because the ventilator at that end of the 
gable had been plugged, and they could not or would not fly the few 
feet to the other end of the building where there was a good exit. On 
the other hand, L. E. Wyman has succeeded in making several fly in 
his screened porch, although it was earher in the season and presumably 
cooler than when I have tried the same experiment. The probable 
explanation of this is that unusually active individuals, or those which 
for some reason are in an unusually active condition, can take wing from 
low situations, but that the majority, especially during the cooler parts 
of the year, need to gain momentum by taking a long dive, before flying. 
Somehow, Eumops has an exotic appearance, as if it were an acci- 
dental visitant to our fauna rather than an established resident. The 
genus is a tropical one, and our species seems rather hard put to it to 
survive. In large colonies of other bats, one. rarely finds a dead indi- 
vidual. I have not only found dead mastiffs in every colony visited, 
but three others in haphazard spots as mentioned, and have heard of 
still more. One really would be justified in pronouncing it a case of 
the gradual elimination of the unfit if it were not for the fact that both 
available shelter and food, because of agriculture and irrigation, are 
much more abundant than they could have been in the past. 
