In the painting “Air” by Jan Brueghel the Elder from 1611, a bat holds a bird in its mouth.
Last fall, scientists documented the greater noctule bat catching songbirds in the air for a snack. But even though it was a relatively new discovery to science, a Renaissance artist knew enough about it to include this behavior in one of his paintings.
“Air,” a 1611 allegorical painting by Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder, depicts more than 60 different species suspended in the air. One of them, top right, appears to be a large noctule bat (Nyctalus lasiopterus), report the researchers on June 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And in his little one, jaws painted in oil, he holds a songbird.
Pedro Romero-Vidal, an ecologist at the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, was working on a project to identify animals in historical paintings, to see what clues they offer about historical ecology. But this particular painted bat was a surprise. “I had never encountered a similar scene in any of the many paintings I had examined before,” he says.
In the work, Urania, the muse of astronomy, is surrounded by aerial creatures, while the Roman gods Apollo and Diana drive the chariots of the sun and moon. Many of the birds perching and standing around Urania are easily recognizable, including parrots, swans, a turkey, and even an ostrich.
There are also four creatures that appear to be bats. The largest bat is in the upper right. It has reddish-brown fur, round ears and long wings, much like noctule bats. Its mouth is clamped tightly around a small body, a feathered wing dangling helplessly below. The size of the predator means it is likely a larger noctule, rather than a smaller common noctule.
While scientists have only directly documented bats taking birds in the past year, researchers have published evidence suggesting that the animals have been counting avians in their diet since the early 2000s, says Ilias Foskolos, a bioacousticist at Aarhus University in Denmark who was not involved in the work. Foskolos recorded the sounds of large noctule bats catching, dismembering and eating songbirds. “It’s an intense event, let’s put it that way,” he said.
Bird naps occur at high altitudes, Foskolos explains. But the evidence eventually falls to earth. Researchers identified telltale feathers from 31 species of songbirds in the droppings of large noctule bats. Brueghel was originally from Brussels, but visited Italy, where the great noctule bat lives and hunts. Even back then, people “probably knew they were looking for the birds in their droppings,” Foskolos says.
This discovery shows that art “can be a valuable source of information about natural history,” says Romero-Vidal. Although “artists have often exercised considerable artistic license,” he says – the Greek muse Urania has yet to be spotted, with bats or otherwise – “they can still preserve valuable observations about the natural world.”
