This wonderful little woodland trail meanders along a bluff overlooking a particularly pristine southern Ohio stream. There is lots of wildflower diversity, and as is the case with sites that harbor great floristic diversity, there is lots of animal diversity.
Mostly, on this trip of last Tuesday, I was looking for a mammal - a very special little mammal. I had been here the previous Saturday, with said mammal high on the list of hoped-for targets, but no luck. We saw lots of other great things, and many nice photos were taken, but the migratory mammal that was a main quest had apparently not yet arrived in these haunts.
As you've gathered from this post's title, it was the Eastern Red Bat,
Lasiurus borealis, that I was after. These tiny "tree bats" are highly migratory, and the most likely species to be seen hunting during daylight hours. When at rest, the bats typically choose trees for roosting and, as we shall see, can be incredibly difficult to spot when ensconced among the foliage.
I've seen Red Bats on numerous occasions and even photographed them on the wing. The last one that I saw was VERY up close and personal - it was captured as part of a researcher's banding project. The one before that I found napping on the side of an Ohio State University parking garage. But what had thus far eluded me was seeing this wee bat making like a leaf in a tree.
The tan-brown leaves in the photo above are those of American Beech,
Fagus grandifolia, and it seems to be the tree of choice for roosting Red Bats.
To make this image, I was prone in the leaf litter. We can see the long-lingering beech leaves of a young sapling projecting in from the left. And if you look quite closely, you may notice a darker lump among those leaves - just left of dead center.
With the help of a 300mm lens and a better lighting angle, we can better make out the "lump". Target acquired - it's a roosting Eastern Red Bat! I was pleased indeed to finally see one of these bats in such habitat, and even more pleased when shortly thereafter I found another one, near eye level.
I'd say it would be a stroke of pure luck - or the result of phenomenal observational skills - for someone to stumble upon one of these bats in a beech tree. But if one is privy to their roosting habits, the odds of locating a Red Bat go way up. I knew they were likely in this area, so I searched the beech trees carefully. However, I've scoured beech for bats many times before, with no luck. Red Bats are even smaller than a beech leaf, and they tend to huddle up next to a leaf or within a small cluster of leaves.
Seen well, the animal is a beast of extraordinary beauty. The pelage is a deep reddish-orange, frosted with a silvery sheen. Small wonder they hide among leaves - the bat is amazingly leaflike and tough to spot among the foliage.
The little fox-like face exudes a certain charm, and those proportionately enormous ears are marvelous augmentations to a remarkably keen sense of hearing.
It would be interesting to know where this bat spent the winter. Red Bats are known to be migratory, and it's possible many of those that pass through or remain to breed in Ohio spent the winter in some southern state. I'm sure FAR more of them are out there than suspected. As this photo essay illustrates, they can quite easily be overlooked. April seems to be a great month for locating Red Bats, and young beech trees with their persistent hanging dead leaves seem to be the best place to search them out. So, should you find yourself in a woodland with beech, keep an eye out for these showy little bats.
