Hello Tweeters Members,

I found the following article of interest. Please note that the video shows an example of the bird eating the bat. It was at first hard to imagine what is similar to a large chickadee hunting bats. I would recommend reading the full article at the site link below.



Briefly:

"P?ter Est?k of the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology , Germany, first saw a bat being captured by a tit in a Hungarian cave in 1996.

Ten years later, he and fellow bat ecologist Bj?rn Siemers recorded 18 examples of pipistrelle bat predation by great tits, over the course of two winters in the same cave in the B?kk Mountains. The birds seek out bats as they wake from hibernation and usually eat them in the cave, though sometimes they carry them to a nearby tree.

As the bats are still very cold, only a degree above ambient temperature, they are extremely slow and easy for the birds to subdue. Nevertheless, it is a considerable feat for the tits given that a pipistrelle weighs approximately 5 grams and a great tit only four times as much.
Gareth Jones , an expert on bat behaviour at the University of Bristol, says the finding is unexpected and novel. "I don't know of any other studies of predation of hibernating bats by small birds. It's a big jump for the tits, given that their normal prey are caterpillars."




See full article and video at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17749-killer-birds-bite-off-bats-heads.html

Best regards,

Dan Reiff

Mercer Island