I would bet that most folk think moths are small, brown, dull and only fly at night. Well some are, but many aren't any of those.
However, we do know that bats are blind. Don't we? Why else would we use the phrase "as blind as a bat"? It turns out, as some of you knowlegeable people no doubt already know, that bats aren't blind. Some have excellent eyesight, even if their superpower is being able to use ultrasonic calls to echolocate and therefore fly blind. This enables them not only to avoid obstacles in pitch darkness but also to catch a moth on the wing. Or at least some moths...
How bats do this was a mystery until a Harvard student called Donald Griffin used a device that allowed him to pick up the ultrasonic calls and observe and describe echolocation. But do all bats echolocate? Actually no: all insectivorous bats do but fruit bats, broadly speaking don't. I suppose they didn't need to evolve that skill as they aren't trying to catch flying things in flight: they use their good eyesight and strong sense of smell to find their (stationary) food in the dark.
Echolocation isn't the only superpower that bats have. They are the only mammal that can fly using what are long-fingered hands with a membrane of skin webbed between them rather than wings. Despite generally weighing only a few grams they can migrate hundreds of miles. They can live for over forty years, which is highly unusual for a small mammal.
There are lots of different bat species - over 1,500 and counting. I was staggered to read that bats comprise 20 per cent of the world's mammal species. There's a white bat: the Honduran white which, unlike like Monty Pyhton's Norwegian Blue parrot really does exist. There's a Mexican fish-eating bat which lives under rocks and hunts out at sea in flocks. (No, I don't know if they catch flying fish). The horseshoe bat emits it's echolocation sugnals through its nostrils.
Mrs H thinks most flying things are creepy. She's not fond of moths buzzing her but a bat would be worse. I was eating in a hotel restaurant in Wasdale in the Lake District on a business trip many years ago when a bat flew into the dining room and did several circuits, some of them in tight loops around one diner's head before it escaped. Mrs H would have totally freaked out if she'd been with me. On her planet vampires weren't a creation of an author, he blagged the story from real life. So vampire bats? Well of course they are real and must drink around 15ml of blood a night - half their body weight - to keep going. While they generally get it from cows, pigs and horses they can target humans and are so gentle they can drink for half an hour without waking their victim. Missing a couple of nights can be fatal but vampire bats share with bats in their roost who fail to get a meal. They are altruistic and sociable - relationships between friendly bats in the same roost can be more important than family ties when it comes to who they'll share with. They remember which bats have shared food with them, even over long periods of time, and build up mutual trust. This is one of the best documented examples of sharing in non-human animals.
Bats are important pollinators and also eat pests that can otherwise decimate crops. The military has funded plenty of research on their sonar capabilities - and into moths' ability to jam their signals and throw them off track.
Ah, moths! Many of you may remember that, after reading a fascinating book called Much Ado About Mothing by James Lowen, I became a bit of a mother. That's moth-er, what the folk in the know call a moth lover. Oh sure, the specialised type of entomologists (insect scientists) who study lepidoptera are called lepidopterists but that includes butterflies, the gaudy summer show offs whose paltry 59 UK varieties flutter briefly around our flowers mainly in the summer. Folks who like mothing have around 2,500 UK species to go at. And unless you're really keen (and I'm not that keen) as Lowen says moths make for gloriously lazy wild life watching. No need to travel, rise early or seek out moths as they come to you at home. Keen amateurs get or make their own moth traps - one morning soon after he had started mothing Lowen found he'd captured 2,800 moths overnight, even if 2,500 of them were a single species. (No I don't know how he estimated those numbers, before releasing them - maybe by weight?) I don't have a trap - I just try to identify the moths we find in the house - there is dark woodland behind us so they do tend to fly in. I haven't counted but must be up to 50 or 60 varieties that I've identified out of the 900 varieties of UK macro-moth, the larger species. I can't be bothered trying to identify any of the larger number of micro-moths, life's too short.
I've debunked previously the idea that moths can't be colourful or that none of them fly by day. But there's no point in looking out for moths in December, is there? Well Mrs H got buzzed by quite a large one in our kitchen the other evening that had flown in through an open window. Confused by the light (because most moths do fly mainly at night) it did laps of the room before settling down somewhere out of sight and leaving her muttering to me about "your bloody moths. Find it, identify it and get rid of it!"
It must have been on top of a cupboard because it couldn't be found. The next morning she shouted me through to the living room as the moth was basking (or exhausted and disorientated) on the carpet in the bright sunshine. A large and grand fellow too, with fabulous markings:
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It turns out that the moth species she found me for Christmas flies between October and December and so, not unreasonably, is called the December moth. He's big - a wingspan of about 30mm. And how do I know it's a him? Well, the females are even larger and can have a wingspan of over 40mm. At first I thought it was female as the males have feathery antennae but on the photo above they are tucked in. When I tried to help him out of the house he fluttered and revealed the feathery antennae you can see below:
I gathered him up and went to put him on my hedge but, before I could, he had swooped away at considerable speed.
Now what I can't tell you is whether the December moth has a bat ultrasonic jamming capability. Maybe we need to get a bat and and a December moth flying around our kitchen in the dark to find out. I can't see Mrs H having much enthusiasm for that experiment!
The Genius Bat by Yossi Yovel is published by Oneworld. Or, like me, you could just read the book review by Adam Weymouth in the Sunday Times of 23 November 2025 which I've extensively plagiarised here.
In Much Ado About Mothing James Lowen describes how, inspired by bird watchers who aim for a "big year" by spotting more than 300 species in 12 months, he designed a quest to add to the 700 or so species he had seen. Trying to get the remianing 1,800 in 12 months was impractical so he targeted over 100 non-garden dwelling species which did necessitate travel and inconvenience but was worth it when he found at least one species that hadn't been spotted for many years and was thought to probably be extinct. I think I'll keep letting them come to me....
