Last fall, scientists documented the greater noctule bat snatching songbirds out of the air for a snack. But while this was a finding relatively new to science, a Renaissance artist knew enough to include the behavior in one of his paintings.
“Air,” a 1611 allegorical painting by the Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder, depicts more than 60 different airborne species. One of them, in the upper right, appears to be a greater noctule bat (Nyctalus lasiopterus), researchers report June 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And in its tiny, oil-painted jaws, it holds a songbird.
Pedro Romero-Vidal, an ecologist at Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, had been working on a project identifying animals in historical paintings, to see what clues they offer about historical ecology. But this particular painted bat came as a surprise. “I had never encountered a similar scene in any of the many paintings I had previously examined,” he says.
In the work, Urania, the Muse of astronomy, is surrounded by creatures of the air, while the Roman gods Apollo and Diana drive chariots of the sun and moon. Many of the birds perched and standing around Urania are easily recognizable, including parrots, swans, a turkey and even an ostrich.
There are also four creatures that appear to be bats. The largest bat is in the upper right. It’s got reddish-brown fur, round ears and long wings, much like noctule bats. Its mouth is clamped firmly around a small body, a feathered wing dangling helplessly below. The predator’s size means it’s probably a greater noctule bat, rather than the smaller common noctule.
While scientists only directly documented bats snatching birds in the past year, researchers have been publishing clues suggesting that the animals counted avians in their diets since the early 2000s, says Ilias Foskolos, a bioacoustician at Aarhus University in Denmark who was not involved in the work. Foskolos has recorded sounds of greater noctule bats catching, dismembering and eating songbirds. “It’s an intense event, let’s put it that way,” he says.
The birdnapping takes place at high altitudes, Foskolos says. But evidence falls to earth eventually. Researchers have identified telltale feathers from up to 31 songbird species in the excrement of greater noctule bats. Brueghel was a native of Brussels, but visited Italy, where the greater noctule bat lives and hunts. Even at the time people “probably knew that they go for birds from their droppings,” Foskolos says.
The finding shows that art “can be a valuable source of natural history information,” Romero-Vidal says. While “artists often exercised considerable artistic license,” he says — the Greek muse Urania has yet to be spotted, with bats or otherwise — “they can still preserve valuable observations about the natural world.”
