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THE BATS OF EPPING FOREST.
By the late EDWARD NEWMAN, F.L.S., F.Z.S.
In the 1874 edition of Mr. Henry Walker's excellent little "Saturday Half-
holiday Guide," to which many of us look back With pleasure, mingled with
regret at its discontinuance, appeared a short paper by the late editor of "The
Zoologist," on the Bats frequenting the Forest. As the "Guide" has been long out
of print, and as so little has since been published on the Vertebrate Fauna of the
Forest, it may be useful to give a condensed account of Mr. Newman's interesting
observations, in illustration of which a set of the seven species of Bats mentioned
will shortly be placed in the Forest Museum at Chingford. The names employed
are those of the Second Edition of Bell's "British Quadrupeds."
" EPPING FOREST swarms with bats. They crowd by day into
the hollow hornbeams, they creep into the faggot stacks, they
hide in the piles of wood and in the roofs of cottages—where cot-
tages of the right sort are left—crawling in through little holes that
have served generations of sparrows and starlings as conduits to their
nesting places under the tiles, sometimes, but very seldom, hiding in
a crevice of rugged bark, a situation they cannot be said to select,
but may be supposed rather to adopt by force of circumstances.
Having delayed their return from nocturnal rambles a little too long,
and so being overtaken by the slanting, searching rays of a summer
morning's sun, they have hastily adopted the axiom of 'any port in
a storm.'
" In these various retreats they slumber all day long, having first
hung themselves up by the toe-nails, head downwards, and having
folded their sable shawls gracefully around them.
******
" No sooner do the shades of evening fall on the Forest and the
stars begin to twinkle, than the bats unhook themselves and unfold
their shawls and take themselves down, as it were, and launch them-
selves into the delicious air of a summer's evening, seeming deter-
mined not to return home until morning, when daylight shall again
appear, and in the meantime, to make a regular night of it.
" Now, if you wish for specimens, it is of no kind of use to shoot
them on the wing, as some have attempted to do. I will not say
that it is impossible to hit them, but it is impossible to find them ;
they fall into the thick brushwood, and are seen no more. The
right way to obtain bats is to search diligently by day in their hiding-