Enquiry & Photos by Marius den Boer
7th January 2007 . Marius den Boer:
Attached I send you a few pictures, made at Arnhem Grotte near Windhoek, Namibia on November 19th 2006.
Can you tell me the name of the species?
Click on
pictures below to view larger image size.
Dear Marius,
Many thanks for the Bat photos. The Bats are almost certainly the Egyptian (Common) Slit-faced Bat. Bats can be difficult creatures to be certain about with their identity and perhaps more difficult from a photo or a sighting and when not captured and examined in the hand. But central Namibia seems to have only one – this – species of Slit-faced Bat. The scientific name is Nycteris thebaica.
This species is broadly distributed in Southern Africa and is a versatile insect eater as it can capture food in flight, by gleaning from a surface (eg from a tree trunk) or by going to ground to collect an insect food item. When feeding they will often hang up under a branch or inside a building with an insect, cut off the dry-part wings and legs and then eat the fleshy part of the insect and frequently return to the same feeding hang-up point. So it is often easy to identify their eating hang-up points and the insect food items from the wings which were cut off. They have one baby (pup) each year in the first part of summer.
I see from your e mail address that you probably live in Holland. I guess you were in Namibia on holiday. It is a beautiful country to visit.
Kind regards,
Nigel Fernsby
Chairman: Gauteng and Northern Regions Bat Interest Group – GNoR BIG.
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