Amazing, fascinating and bizarre are the words that barely start to describe the bats of the world. Some are big, some tiny, many eat insects and fruit, yet there are others with more unusual tastes in food - such as the fisherman bat which uses its claws to catch fish or the unjustly demonized blood-eating vampire bats. Bats will not fly into your hair, and they are not blind, though most find their food and avoid obstacles in the darkness of night not by vision, but by using their remarkable and highly developed sense of echolocation. Their role in pollination is crucial to the environment in which they live. Bats are full of suprises. With such a large array of species, bat expert Phil Richardson takes you on a guided tour of the nocturnal world of bats: where they live, how they feed, and how they survive in almost every habitat on the planet. He uses his experiences of bat watching around the world to bring these misunderstood creatures to life, describing their complex life cycles, explaining how readers can watch and study bats and help conserve these often threatened mammals. Wherever you live, there are likely to be bats near you, so discover more with the help of this book.

 

This book is part of a book series called Life Series .

There are 112 pages in this book. This book was published 2002 by The Natural History Museum .

Phil Richardson is a science teacher by day and spends evenings and holidays working with bats. He helped popularise bats in the UK by making them appealing to the public in TV and radio presentations, and in the setting up of a number of volunteer bat groups and the Bat Conservation Trust, the national body involved in bat conservation. He is the author of Bats (2000).

This book has the following chapters: Preface; Bat evolution, diversity, classification and biology; Bat behaviour; Megabats; Microbats; A tail to be told; Carnivorous bats; As plain as the nose on your face; Vampires and relatives; Vesper bats; Glossary; Index; Further information.