Renaissance Painting Shows Bat Eating Bird 400 Years Before Scientific Record

A 1611 allegorical painting by Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder shows a greater noctule bat with a songbird in its jaws. The detail appears in the upper right section of the work titled "Air," which depicts more than 60 airborne species. Researchers reported the identification June 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The bat has reddish-brown fur, round ears, and long wings consistent with the greater noctule species, and a feathered wing hangs from its mouth.

Brueghel the Elder was born in Brussels and visited Italy, where greater noctule bats live and hunt. The painting places the bat among recognizable birds including parrots, swans, a turkey, and an ostrich, along with three other bat figures. Scientists first directly documented greater noctule bats catching songbirds last fall.

Earlier studies since the early 2000s had found feathers from up to 31 songbird species in the bats' droppings, and audio recordings captured the animals catching, dismembering, and eating birds at high altitudes.

An ecologist working on a project to identify animals in historical paintings noted that the bat-and-bird scene had not appeared in other works examined. The same project aims to extract clues about past ecosystems from art. A bioacoustician not involved in the study said people at the time likely knew of the behavior from droppings.

The finding indicates that paintings can preserve observations of natural history even when artists take some liberties with subject matter.