What is your favourite species of bat? 🦇

Man

Common pipistrelle. It is a story I love telling people. One hot summer evening I heard one of my cats making weird noises, found her hunting something which was trying to get away. Thought it was a mouse but then it flew... I managed to remove said cat from the situation and came face to face with the little bat which was baring its teeth and squeaking at me but looked absolutely knackered with a couple of teeth marks where the cat had caught it.

I found a box and trapped the poor thing under it and then realised that I now had an injured bat in a box and no idea what to do... So had a quick google of "what to do with injured bat". I found the website for the UK bat conversation group who have a handy page on "Help I've found a bat" and tells you exactly what to do (basically make a little box for the bat and phone the national bat helpline).

As it was late I had to keep the little bat overnight and call the helpline again in the morning to get a bat rescuer volunteer to pick up the bat. Unfortunately when I did call they were all busy and the one who could get to me was going in completely the opposite direction. However I found out the nearest bat hospital was only about 10 miles down the road in a village not far from me. So I headed out on a stupidly hot (ok yes, hot for UK standards) day armed with my bat-in-a-box.

When I got there it was literally somebody's (rather nice) house and they had converted a bunch of rooms downstairs to be dedicated to bat care. I got to see them examine the bat and put it in its new temporary home whilst they give it antibiotics (apparently being bitten by a cat with no antibiotics is nearly a certain death sentence). Then after being told some bat info and given a bat rescue pack I was sent on my way home with my story of my little bat friend.

Here is a terrible picture of the bat:

And of the culprit:

I like this story. I hope the nice bat is flying around now chomping mosquitoes

Fruit.

- Aww yeah that's the stuff

Where I work we often see tricolored bats. They're just the cutest lil' nuggets, killing off the local mosquitos. You go, wee nugget of the sky.

The Large Flying Fox. Absolute unit of a bat.

Used to help a friend's family raise orphaned flying foxes. They are the cutest little bastards. Used to put on a wool jumper before walking into their place as they would chirp recognition at you, as they dangled from a clothes rack, then launch off and flap across the room to latch onto your shoulders. The jumper made it so a lot less of your skin was involved in supporting their weight.
- I was lucky enough to spend a semester abroad in NSW Australia when I was in high school and I volunteered at a wild animal sanctuary there and they had some flying foxes. They were so cool, but you had to be careful when you entered their cage because they would either climb all over you or piss on your head.
~~Got these near my house~~. Actually it’s the grey headed flying fox. Cutest bats of all time but their shit is not something you want on your car

Wom

The one that spreaded COVID

Hoary

Vampire

The right answer

Fruit bats are so cute, but I think my favorite are the ones who fly crazy in our evenings in the city chowing down on mosquitoes, I believe they are Little Brown Bats.

Those huge ones in Southeast Asia

Yeah, I like those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyu_flying_fox

They're a fruit bat in the Southeast Asian tropics. Absolutely massive bats. You walk under a palm tree and there are a dozen large puppies looking down at you. The fruit farmers of the region are ecocidal toward them, despite deforestation being the reason why they're congregating in the only reliable food source left. They're a great generalist pollinator with a similar ecological niche as squirrels, shitting out edible plant seeds over an almost 2km range.