Bats!

Did you know that bats are super diverse and account for 1/5th of all mammals! There are so many funny looking bats and they include white bats with yellow noses and ears, the trumpet-nosed bat, sucker-footed bats, and more. The bumblebee bat is one of the smallest mammals in the world weighing in at only 2 grams, it lives in Thailand.

The most common species in Niagara is the little brown bat, followed by the big brown bat. The brown bats like to eat mosquitos that hover over the Niagara River at night. There is also the hoary bat, Eastern small-footed myotis, Northern long-eared myotis, the eastern red bat, the tri-coloured bat, and the silver-haired bat, all in Niagara and much of Ontario.

Every species of bat can see with their eyes, they have them after all. If you do find yourself, "blind as a bat", you may actually have much better eyesight than those humans around you, bats are great at seeing in low light conditions. While some bats solely rely on echolocation, fruit bats, also called flying foxes, actually cannot echolocate at all. Fruit bats are quite promiscuous, while other bats will stay with the same partner for life. It is also interesting to note that bats do give birth while hanging upside down!

Only one species of bat drinks blood by the way, and they do so by making small incision in livestock and lapping up the blood that comes out. As expected this bat is called the vampire bat, it lives in Central and South America. Another bat you will thankfully never see in Canada is the hammer-headed bat. A fruit eating megabat of central Africa, it is quite something to behold, so I leave you with a picture.

If you would like to find out more about bats in Ontario, check-out the Ontario Bat Guide.