Lesser long-eared bat
Nyctophilus geoffroyi
— Where the name comes from
Nyctophilus is “lover of the night”, from the Greek nýx and phílos. Geoffroyi recalls Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the French naturalist who appears in the names of half the animal kingdom and who was, among other things, Cuvier’s opponent in the famous 1830 debate at the Academy of Sciences on the unity of bodily plan.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Bats
- Habitat
- Almost every Australian environment, from desert to forest to cities
- Range
- The whole of Australia and Tasmania
- Size
- 4–5 cm of body, 25 cm wingspan, 6–10 g
- Diet
- Insectivore — insects gathered off foliage and the ground
- Lifespan
- Little known
— Characteristics
- 01
It has the widest range of any Australian bat: it is practically everywhere.
- 02
It shelters in improbable places: hanging laundry, letterboxes, parts of cars.
- 03
It flies very slowly and manoeuvres among dense vegetation.
— What sets it apart
It gets into everything, and Australian rescue centres keep a comic and disheartening catalogue: inside washing hung out and then folded, under car seats, in letterboxes, among the folds of closed parasols, inside shoes left on the veranda. Slow flight and a fondness for narrow crevices lead it to mistake any gap for a split in bark. It is the bat that most often ends up inside an Australian house, and nearly always by mistake.
