Bats
Are very interesting, harmless little creatures here in South Africa. The insect eating bats eat about their own weight in insects every night and help to control mosquito numbers.
I caught many yellow house bats as a youngster on the farm we were staying by lifting the corrugated roof sheets on the barn. They were normally huddled together in groups of five to ten. They were tiny little things and definitely not the ferocious monsters as portrayed by Hollywood movies and "old wife's tales". There is absolutely no way that little thing is going to get tangled in your hair unless you put it there yourself.
Upon examination of their "wings" I found that they consist of an upper arm, lower arm and then the five fingers. Four of these fingers were inside the wings and the "thumb" was like a little hook on top of the hand and they use these little hooks to move around and to climb up walls. The wings consists of very thin skin full of little veins. This skin covers the whole of the wing and the tail like the sketch I made...
They can find their prey and their way around in the darkest of nights by using "echo-location". They send out very high frequency sounds through their noses or mouths and the sound then bounces off any object in front of them, back to their sensitive, larger than normal ears and their brains immediately changes these sounds into an image of their surroundings.
The order Chiroptera is divided into two suborders namely:
Megachiroptera:
Fruit-bats, generally larger than their cousins, microchiroptera. They have large eyes and good eyesight, but our Egyptian fruit-bat still make use of echo-location to find their way around the dark caves they sleep in. The other fruit-bat species prefer to sleep out in trees. They eat fruit and flower nectar.
Microchiroptera
66 of these species occur in South Africa and they are all insectivores. You often see the yellow house bat flying in the evenings where they dive swiftly through the light of street lamps looking for insects.