Common Vampire Bat

I like bats very much, they are so unusual, a but scary, but very cute! Our zoo has a good collection of them, this particular one is not from Australia, it is American. I started it as a pencil sketch at the zoo and finished at home with pastel and wax crayons.

The grandparents' house, the martins ' house

This work was commissioned and it was therefore constructed to be suitable for the context where it is finalized, an didactic panel, but was also an opportunity to create a subject non-purely naturalistic, even though this place is permeated by naturality . It is the grandparents' house, that is the house where my wife is born, to whom we are deeply linked.
A large colony of martins inhabit under the attic, into the attic were born generations of barn owls and bats live in the cracks .... The garden is alive and rich in fruits and small animals. In short, a great place to be represented in this work.

Bats in the wetland

Yesterday I drawed for a life-project on the bats, and I was faced with....a darkness atmosphere, I started with water color and I finished the job in this way...
Ciao
Sandro

Little Brown Bat - Aleta Karstad

24 August 2009, Bishops Mills, Ontario

I don't often get a chance to hold a bat! This one came to us on the bumper of our car, driven home late last evening by our son. He says he didn't notice a bat clinging to the bumper, but we saw it there this morning. The right wing was broken but the eye was still bright, which leads us to surmise the sad story that it spent the night clinging to the bumper after it had collided with the car, and finally succumbed to shock and exposure shortly before we found it.

Fred said "Look at its eyes" - which I thought was a strange thing to say, as a bat's eyes are so small that one seldom sees them. But held at the right angle under good light, they were tiny, but lifelike and bright.

All my plans for the day were set aside, and I devoted the next five hours to a watercolour, about twice life size, celebrating its particular beauty of fine detail as the least I can do to save something of its "bat-ness", to faithfully render as much as I can of the vitality that this Little Brown Bat will have no more. To capture the delicate straightness of the thin, tapered tragus projecting from the ear, and to try to show the dense black whiskers that screen the lips, and the interesting pointed black eyebrow - and the texture of the leathery soft tissue of the ear.

It seems that "White Nose Disease", spreading north into New York State, has not yet been found among the bats of eastern Ontario - but how long will their colonies be healthy?
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/bat_crisis_the_white-nose_syndrome/
These flying mice are so precious - it would be so sad to lose them all!

Winged mammals

This year I raised baby bats, and so had the opportunity to observe more closely these curious micromammals. They are so micro, I had to take pictures in order to sketch them!
Feeding them milk with a micropipette, while looking at how they move and respond, was a fascinating experience.

This little guy is a pup of Kuhl's bat. As adults, they can be identified by a white line on the edge of their wing membrane.

Bats belong to the Order Chiroptera, from the Greek cheiro, hand, and ptera, wing. They have a thin, transparent membrane, called the patagium, which extends from the neck and across the fingers and, in most species, includes the tail as well. Like us, they possess 5 fingers, but their bones are lighter than those of other mammals. The clawed thumb is free, and it is used for climbing around the roost.

Bats have good vision, but depend on echolocation to navigate and hunt down their prey. When the bat emits a sound wave, he than listens for the returning echo, which conveys important information. If the echo reaches the right ear before the left, the insect is to the right, while the intensity of the echo carries information on the size of the insect. When the insect is moving away from the bat, the returning echo has a lower pitch.
The many folds present in the bat's ears help the animal determine the insect vertical position.

With a body length of 3 and half inches and a wing length of 2 and half inches at the most, the European Free-tailed Bat, on the left, is one of the largest bat species to be found in Europe, Asia and Africa.