Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/119

Rh captivity that it is strange that so little is known about its ways. Of all bats, except perhaps the long-eared, this species is the least difficult to keep under artificial conditions. It requires no taming process to induce it to feed; it rapidly connects human fingers with the food that they supply, though it does not seem so easily to recognise that the finger itself is inedible. When captured or wounded the noctule bites fiercely, and though its teeth do not make a serious wound they draw blood, for they are exceedingly sharp, and the jaws which can scrunch the hard armour of dor or cockchafer are powerful. For weeks I have kept noctules in a box, releasing them for exercise every evening. There were nineteen in the hollow from which some of my captives came, and of these sixteen were males; that looks as if the sexes form separate colonies. Almost immediately that the captives were placed in their new home they took food from my hand. The best beloved food was the mealworm; the larva of a beetle; this they preferred to their natural diet of dors, or big-bodied moths. Mealworms can hardly be looked upon as natural food, for the larvæ of beetles cannot come in the way of animals which feed upon the wing; yet it is the food which, once tasted, no bat can resist.

In a very short time my noctules would scuttle across the table to my hand when I offered mealworms, but so frequently did they fix their sharp teeth in my fingers that I began to offer the gift from between forceps. There was no suggestion of anger in this attack; it was merely anxiety to get as much food as possible in a short time. But there was one interesting fact apparent: as the bat feeds in flight, it never seemed to realise that it could recover food that it had dropped; it would walk over a maimed and struggling worm to ask for more. The long-eared bat, which often captures insects at rest, would hunt on the floor of its cage for an insect which had escaped.