finance
1611 Brueghel Painting Shows Bat Preying on Songbird, Study Says
GB News reported that a new PNAS study identifies a greater noctule bat catching a bird in Jan Brueghel the Elder's 1611 work titled Air. The depiction matches behavior confirmed by scientists only in the past year.
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A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined the 1611 oil-on-copper painting Air by Jan Brueghel the Elder and identified a greater noctule bat shown with a songbird gripped in its jaws. GB News reported that the canvas contains more than 60 identifiable flying species and that the bat depiction matches physical traits of the species.
Spanish ecologist Pedro Romero-Vidal made the identification while inspecting the upper portion of the painting.
He described the bat's compact rounded ears, slender wing structure, and reddish-brown fur colouration as visible markers that allowed species-level recognition. GB News reported that international teams fitted wild greater noctule bats with miniature backpacks recording altitude, velocity, and acoustic data.
The devices documented steep dives used to capture migrating songbirds in flight, confirming the behaviour within the past year.
For generations zoologists had treated accounts of such predation as rumours. Brueghel traveled extensively through Italy, where greater noctule populations remain larger than in Belgium, and he visited royal animal collections while consulting early natural historians. The PNAS paper is titled Natural history on canvas: Brueghel knew about bird-eating noctule bats.
