Evening bat
Nycticeius humeralis
— Where the name comes from
Nycticeius is built on the Greek nýx, “night”, with an ending nobody has ever explained well; humeralis is the Latin “of the shoulder”, from humerus, for a pale patch at the base of the wings. The English name, evening bat, comes from its habit of emerging very early, while it is still light — the opposite of the European serotine, whose name says the reverse.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Bats
- Habitat
- Tree hollows and attics in deciduous woodland and farmland
- Range
- The eastern United States and north-eastern Mexico
- Size
- 8–10 cm including tail, 28 cm wingspan, 7–14 g
- Diet
- Insectivore — beetles and insects of farmland
- Lifespan
- Up to 6 years
— Characteristics
- 01
The females form breeding colonies of hundreds of animals.
- 02
It nearly always bears twins, which is uncommon among bats.
- 03
It hardly ever uses caves, in summer or in winter.
— What sets it apart
The females nurse each other’s young. In breeding colonies it has been documented that a female returning from hunting lets pups that are not hers suckle, at a rate too high to be recognition error: about one feed in five goes to somebody else’s young. Communal nursing is rare among mammals and rarer still among bats, where the norm is that every mother knows her own offspring by scent and voice among hundreds.
