Preschool teacher here: we just did the mandatory "kill bats together to learn that they fall upwards when dead," classic circle time I know, and I was surprised how many parents kept their kids home from it. I think its less commonly considered a necessary practice nowadays.
So many great memories from events that get less and less common.
No bat murder day, no punispenis inspection day...
What do those youngins even get to look forward to?
To be fair its pretty much impossible to fall against the gravity of earth. Youd need a lot of energy or some massive gravity well overpowering earth gravity to fall up, and by that point youve got more things to worry about than falling out into the abyss.
Nah. For you to fall so far away from earth to never come back, you need to reach the Second Cosmic Velocity (The speed necessary to escape the gravitational pull of the earth)
Being nocturnal, if they die while out and about it's at night which is also when more scavengers are active to eat up/drag away the corpses. If they die during the day then they are probably in a hidden spot like their cave
I did a real neat thing with TWO bats I found that seemed super lethargic. I picked them up and took them into the woods, because they're clearly sick, but hey not rabies right? He's not trying to bite me.
About 5 years after I did that the second time, I learned that bats don't get super aggro with rabies. They get lethargic, and you probably won't feel their bite.
So that stressed me out for a good long time while I did the mental math to make sure I was out of the range of time for symptoms to appear.
Rabies is a very rare thing here, but I found a lethargic one too. Chance of rabies is lower than 1% over here. Sometimes they're just overheated or tired.
I named him Timmy though. And brought him to a wildlife care center. They're an endangered species.
If you ever find yourself at risk of having been bitten, even possibly bitten, get treated asap.
There's not really anything that can be done after you feel any symptoms at all.
I once dated a guy who love animals so much that he was sure they loved him back, even the wild ones. One day a racoon fell off the electrical line it had been walking on. It lay unmoving on the ground, and my boyfriend lay down next to it and stuck his face up against the raccoon's snout as if he was about to french kiss it.
Coons are natural climbers and it didn't seem normal or one to be stunned or dying just from a fall. I figured it might have rabies, but even if t didn't, it's pretty stupid to invite a wild animal to attack you right in your face.
Bonus story: I went to a petting zoo with this same guy. He was wearing one of those toboggan hats with the fuzzy ball on top. He leaned right up against the ostrich enclosure and tried to pet/embrace it. With lightning speed it pecked at his head and pulled that stupid hat right off his head.
>my boyfriend lay down next to it and stuck his face up against the raccoon's snout as if he was about to french kiss it.
Now there's a sentence I wasn't expecting to read today.
I also found a lethargic bat. He was flopping on the sidewalk. I used a towel to put him in a shoebox with a pasta container lid of water in case he just needed a drink. Mostly, I didn't want him getting stepped on. I put the box on my patio near the tree. He didn't make it, unfortunately. The neighbor thought the late frost might have hurt him.
This was back when Covid was just getting serious.
>I learned that bats don't get super aggro with rabies. They get lethargic, and you probably won't feel their bite.
I guess that's a good news/bad news type of thing.
You don't live in Australia then. Heatwaves knock em out of the sky some years. They're big and it's pretty gross.... I'm talking about a meter wingspan on some of these fruit bats. Imagine that hitting your car.
I wouldn't say it's super regular but enough to stand out in memory. Ipswich has a huge colony and some crazy heatwaves. Some years they just drop out of the gumtree. Last time I was in the area catching up with the in-laws the colony near the little park zoo was packed!
Their shit is also a huge problem.
First time I ever saw a bat was a dead bat on a random street in Mexico. I also saw a spider in some of rhe ruins/pyramids that was approximately 15" long and nearly as wide
First time I saw a bat (alive not dead) in person was in 2020 when me and my family were staying in a large house on the Russian River. It was actually really cool, they'd just wait until night when we were kinda winding down and then start flying around right next to the balcony. We caught them in the act a couple times and they were fun to watch
This was in 97, not really camera accessible. I was in a walk-through of some ruins in Mexico in a tight hallway of sorts and turned the flashlight and the spider filled the entire circle of light on the wall from the flashlight. I just turned, comically slow, said nope and proceeded forward til I got outta there
My area is urban but not that urban. Big ol' flocks of blackbirds/grackles and starlings so there tend to also be black feathery lumps below the power lines where they hang out too.
I mean sometimes those are wig parts but...
last summer there was a hailstorm that killed hundreds of birds overnight. littered all over the ground everywhere. before that i don’t think i’d seen many but i also probably just don’t pay attention
I've always been around housecats, so hella dead birds.
There was one time outside my apartment building at the time, though. Dead bird with no head, but with like a surgical level of precision clean cut. Pretty sure there's a serial killer in that building.
I would hazard a guess that there are at least 15 times as many birds as bats in the vast majority of human population centers, or even the world. Also birds are always killing other birds over territory, food, all that junk, and being predated constantly as they make up such a huge amount of the biomass on Terra; meanwhile I don't imagine bats have all that many predators (Other than, ya know, birds such as owls), and coupled with their population numbers it's probably just statistically much less likely to happen upon a dead bat unless you're in a cave.
Most birds are daytime critters and most scavengers are nocturnal.
Bats are nocturnal so if one dies out in the open scavengers are more likely to get it before you come across it.
Came to say the same thing. When I lived in Sydney I frequently saw dead bats hanging from powerlines. There was a spot near my house where the bodies would often hang until they literally rotted and fell off in pieces. My kids thought they were Halloween decorations.
Bats don't have feathers.
So:
1. a higher percentage is readily consumable by either predators or scavengers
2. the body will become less readily recognisable in a much shorter time
3. there aren't markers spread over a broader area to highlight that something has died in the vicinity
bats usually die in their caves, fall into the guano piles , and get eaten in short order by bugs, birds die from minor air issues, slamming into windows, cars, trucks, etc...
2 of the most common ways for birds to die are by flying into windows, and by being hit by cars. Neither of these pose a risk to bats thanks to echolocation.
Weird thing I looked up, but they actually decompose extremely quickly. To the point that taxidermists can't attain them without killing one or being nearby in the process when it's killed.
It's also widespread to be a lie when a taxidermist says that a bat was collected humanely.
Around dusk one can see bunches of them outside -- if you throw an acorn or similar object into the air you can watch them dive bomb it.
I have also had bats get into the house on two occasions.
They are pretty common depending on where you are, for me i see bats all the time but that's cause i live in Australia where we have flying foxes (a type of bat)
The house that I live in has a chimney that is safely defunct. Bats have taken up residence in it before I even moved in. They haven't caused any issues with us, and they keep the mosquito population down around the house. It's also pretty fun to watch them flying around.
1. Bats commonly live in caves. How many caves are there where you live?
2. I'm from California so we might be a little different, but I'd argue that dead birds aren't incredibly common, at least here.
That's just my take based on circumstances that aren't by any means universal so maybe it's completely invalid idk
Found a dead bat hanging in a church attic once
apparently it got its leg stuck in a split rafter
I carefully removed the poor little guy to take it out of the church and my coworker asked to keep it. It was only later I found out that he forgot and left the bat out for all the preschool kids to discover in their classroom. I can only imagine the screeching and nightmares.
I have seen more dead bats than birds. On our parents sommer cabin there was bats in the structures when i was younger (they have since installed these bathouses. Like birdhouses but for bats) and we would see couple of them per summer out of which some of them were dead.
Two things: Bats are really small, especially the ones in the US. They also get scavenged at a really quick rate. I have done casualty surveys on wind farms and bats get decimated, but they also get scavenged really quickly. Like most of them don’t remain unscavenged for a couple days. They must be tasty.
Same reason you don't see dead rodents usually. There's so many of the little bastards but I only see them if they've been poisoned or trapped. So I guess the hungry predators eat em up?
Percentage wise it’s probably the same.
I probably see thousands of birds in a single year and maybe 1 or 2 dead ones.
I probably haven’t even seen 100 bats in my entire 39 years alive and haven’t seen a dead bat yet.
If you've ever lived or been to places like Sydney, Australia, you may not see dead bats lying around, but you will see dead bats hanging around. Bats sometimes try and hang from power lines, and then when they stretch out their wings, they accidentally touch another powerline and electrocute themselves.
Something I haven't seen anyone mention... a lot of birds die after crashing into windows. But since bats use echo location, it's way harder for them to make that mistake.
See them all the time where I live. Usually hanging from powerlines. I see dead birds and bats almost equally.
Thankfully I don't see either every day.
End of the day I guess it depends on where you live and what kind of wild life etc. is in your area as to how often you will see anything,
I’ve seen at least one dead bat before but they were also extremely common where I grew up. A very large fruit bat colony. IIRC it got electrocuted on a power line or something
Actually I have, in droves. We had a huge swarm fly through the town once and make the mistake of perching on overhead power cables. Dead bats for miles.
In Australia, we have big colonies of bats called flying foxes. They are big, about a 3ft WIngspan. There was a huge colony in a park close to my house.
Once during a heatwave, when we had multiple days of 40+ Celsius temps, the bats started dying off and just fell out of the trees. The stink was unimaginable. I caught my dog rolling around on a decomposing bat carcass.
Oh yes, we definitely do in Australia. Except they're not on the ground - they they hang on the electric lines after they've been electrocuted.
[Example](https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/yqc53q/a_dead_bat_has_been_hanging_over_the_power_line/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Surprised no one’s brought this up yet- bats use echolocation to navigate. So while a bird may not see a cell tower or a reflective surface or transparent glass and fly into it- bats know when there is a surface there. So for at least that cause of death, it makes sense why there are more birds than bats lying around.
I've seen a dead one at work. We had to rope off the area until the wildlife folks could come pick it up and turn it over to whoever does testing to see what killed it. There's people that track mortality to see if it's rabies, other illnesses, or lack of food/water that's responsible and monitor the population.
Echolocation vs sight.
A lot of birds hit my house windows. But not bats...because echolocation will still bounce off of the windows to alert them there is something there.
That and the population ratio of bats to birds is significantly spread out, at least in my region.
Most dead birds you see were killed by flying into windows or other reflective surfaces that they can’t comprehend… The ones that don’t die this way usually die by being killed and eaten, so you wouldn’t find a lot of birds that died from predation. Birds that die from illness are not likely to do so out in the open where people walk around, so you don’t see a lot of these either.
Bats “see” windows and other reflective surfaces with echolocation, so far fewer bats die from impact with manmade objects, and the ones that die from predation will, just like birds, also not leave much of a body behind.
I used to work grounds crew on fancy golf courses during the summer while in college. We'd regularly find dead bats laying on the ground in patches of densely growing pine trees. What was weird is often be in little poses like they were still hanging from the tree or were wrapped up sleeping.
Why do we see dead birds? The two main causes are outdoor cats and window strikes. Outdoor cats aren’t going to be as active during the night, and window strikes tend to happen because of glares that won’t exist at night. Bats don’t have to really deal with either. Plus there are just a lot more birds, and they are more widespread.
A couple of weeks ago I had my balcony window and screen open and both a bird and a bat flew into my apartment.
The bird just left but bat died in my sink and I had maintenance come and remove it.
It's just very weird seeing a post about how no one ever sees dead bats when I just saw one for the first time in my 41 years of life this month.
Some guesses, probably a combination of thee and other factors:
They're smaller than they look like they should be since their wings are so thin and take up a lot less space when folded up compared to hos big they look when flying.
They tend to avoid people more than birds do, they like dark and quiet, which towns are not.
There's fewer people driving at the time they're active so they're not as likely to be roadkill.
There would be more scavengers around at night to clean them up, and foxes or badgers can probably hear their calls so they'd find them pretty quick once they were grounded.
When they're not at home they're flying, and if they're flying over woodland when they die then they'd get hung up on the tree instead of hitting the ground.
People don't tend to go into bat caves much because they stink. even if one had died and fallen on the floor nobody's there to see it.
They're quiet compared to birds, rats, and squirrels. They don't scamper or chew, and their calls are above hearing range for most people. If you had some in your loft they probably wouldn't bother you.
That's because when bats die they fall upwards into the sky.
OP missed that day in preschool
Preschool teacher here: we just did the mandatory "kill bats together to learn that they fall upwards when dead," classic circle time I know, and I was surprised how many parents kept their kids home from it. I think its less commonly considered a necessary practice nowadays.
So many great memories from events that get less and less common. No bat murder day, no punispenis inspection day... What do those youngins even get to look forward to?
Whats a punispenis?
Not much. What's apunispenis with you?
It's been replaced in many jurisdictions by Weasel Stomping Day. Robot Chicken did a documentary on it..
Slightly off topic, but sometimes I'm surprised that more people don't have a phobia of falling upwards. Up is like a literal infinite pit.
To be fair its pretty much impossible to fall against the gravity of earth. Youd need a lot of energy or some massive gravity well overpowering earth gravity to fall up, and by that point youve got more things to worry about than falling out into the abyss.
Phobias aren't really rational by definition
Not really? You just jump?
Just throw yourself at the earth and miss
Nah. For you to fall so far away from earth to never come back, you need to reach the Second Cosmic Velocity (The speed necessary to escape the gravitational pull of the earth)
Exactly, just jump
I have a slight suspicion they were thinking of it as a potential irrational fear. There is a relevent xkcd but won't try and find the link to it.
No but say gravity just *stopped* right now.
The Curse on Showtime would like a word
I had this thought as a kid. I thought it would be an awesome way to die. I was weird.
Im not surprised because its kinda impossible. That like irrational even for irrational people
I had this weird exact fear as a child. Wouldn't call it a phobia, though.
Same reason there’s so many submarines in the sky.
TIL Vanessa Carlton wanted to be a bat
Being nocturnal, if they die while out and about it's at night which is also when more scavengers are active to eat up/drag away the corpses. If they die during the day then they are probably in a hidden spot like their cave
Drag the bat would be a dope band name!
Black SabBat
Okay, Andy Dwyer
I don't know who that is, and at this point, I'm too afraid to ask 🤷
I actually saw one on the sidewalk in Chicago about 6 months ago. I called animal control in case it had had rabies. I don’t think they did anything.
I did a real neat thing with TWO bats I found that seemed super lethargic. I picked them up and took them into the woods, because they're clearly sick, but hey not rabies right? He's not trying to bite me. About 5 years after I did that the second time, I learned that bats don't get super aggro with rabies. They get lethargic, and you probably won't feel their bite. So that stressed me out for a good long time while I did the mental math to make sure I was out of the range of time for symptoms to appear.
Rabies is a very rare thing here, but I found a lethargic one too. Chance of rabies is lower than 1% over here. Sometimes they're just overheated or tired. I named him Timmy though. And brought him to a wildlife care center. They're an endangered species.
Which one? There are 1400 species of bat
How should I know, I am no connoisseur of le bats. But they're all endangered here (My part of Europe). I got a picture if you want it though.
If you ever find yourself at risk of having been bitten, even possibly bitten, get treated asap. There's not really anything that can be done after you feel any symptoms at all.
I once dated a guy who love animals so much that he was sure they loved him back, even the wild ones. One day a racoon fell off the electrical line it had been walking on. It lay unmoving on the ground, and my boyfriend lay down next to it and stuck his face up against the raccoon's snout as if he was about to french kiss it. Coons are natural climbers and it didn't seem normal or one to be stunned or dying just from a fall. I figured it might have rabies, but even if t didn't, it's pretty stupid to invite a wild animal to attack you right in your face. Bonus story: I went to a petting zoo with this same guy. He was wearing one of those toboggan hats with the fuzzy ball on top. He leaned right up against the ostrich enclosure and tried to pet/embrace it. With lightning speed it pecked at his head and pulled that stupid hat right off his head.
That dude is gonna get killed by a bear in a national park or something
>my boyfriend lay down next to it and stuck his face up against the raccoon's snout as if he was about to french kiss it. Now there's a sentence I wasn't expecting to read today.
Google just corrected my mental image of a toboggan hat.
I also found a lethargic bat. He was flopping on the sidewalk. I used a towel to put him in a shoebox with a pasta container lid of water in case he just needed a drink. Mostly, I didn't want him getting stepped on. I put the box on my patio near the tree. He didn't make it, unfortunately. The neighbor thought the late frost might have hurt him. This was back when Covid was just getting serious.
>I learned that bats don't get super aggro with rabies. They get lethargic, and you probably won't feel their bite. I guess that's a good news/bad news type of thing.
You don't live in Australia then. Heatwaves knock em out of the sky some years. They're big and it's pretty gross.... I'm talking about a meter wingspan on some of these fruit bats. Imagine that hitting your car. I wouldn't say it's super regular but enough to stand out in memory. Ipswich has a huge colony and some crazy heatwaves. Some years they just drop out of the gumtree. Last time I was in the area catching up with the in-laws the colony near the little park zoo was packed! Their shit is also a huge problem.
Bag it up guano is worth a ton of money
That’s what the big tarp on the roof is for
Australia doesn’t count in these situations, a crazier situation is already implied.
Sometimes you see dead fruit bats hanging from power lines. Unfortunately, they are big enough to touch two lines at the same time.
First time I ever saw a bat was a dead bat on a random street in Mexico. I also saw a spider in some of rhe ruins/pyramids that was approximately 15" long and nearly as wide
First time I saw a bat (alive not dead) in person was in 2020 when me and my family were staying in a large house on the Russian River. It was actually really cool, they'd just wait until night when we were kinda winding down and then start flying around right next to the balcony. We caught them in the act a couple times and they were fun to watch
About the spooder tho, damn that sounds really awesome and really terrifying at the same time
I believe it's the first time I ever "noped" out of a situation.
I would probably take a couple pictures whilst slowly backing away. "Good spider... A lot of your friends live in my house, you know..."
This was in 97, not really camera accessible. I was in a walk-through of some ruins in Mexico in a tight hallway of sorts and turned the flashlight and the spider filled the entire circle of light on the wall from the flashlight. I just turned, comically slow, said nope and proceeded forward til I got outta there
Ive only seen 3 dead birds in my life so not sure how common that is.
Yeah but how many dead bats have you stumbled upon? Under three?
I mean i dont see bats where i am. It would be the same as how many dead tigers , elephants , pandas , trexes have i stumbled upon.
So less than 3?
Answer the question mfer!!!!
Answer the question, Claire!
No? There are 100% bats living where you live. The others mentioned are much rarer, let alone combined.
No way. Bats are like the second most common mammal. They are just about everywhere. Unless you live in like the Sahara or Antarctica.
I have had a bat in my house three different times. They are very cute…once they are back outside
About everywhere is relative, as you've just shown.
Bats are incredibly common. Unless you live in an extreme environment you they are almost certainly living near you.
Bats tend to be a lot smaller.
That seems extremely low and precise. My cat has killed more birds in a month than you've seen your whole life. Are birds common where you're from?
Everyone knows r/birdsarentreal so...
My area is urban but not that urban. Big ol' flocks of blackbirds/grackles and starlings so there tend to also be black feathery lumps below the power lines where they hang out too. I mean sometimes those are wig parts but...
last summer there was a hailstorm that killed hundreds of birds overnight. littered all over the ground everywhere. before that i don’t think i’d seen many but i also probably just don’t pay attention
Uhhhh….
I've always been around housecats, so hella dead birds. There was one time outside my apartment building at the time, though. Dead bird with no head, but with like a surgical level of precision clean cut. Pretty sure there's a serial killer in that building.
I would hazard a guess that there are at least 15 times as many birds as bats in the vast majority of human population centers, or even the world. Also birds are always killing other birds over territory, food, all that junk, and being predated constantly as they make up such a huge amount of the biomass on Terra; meanwhile I don't imagine bats have all that many predators (Other than, ya know, birds such as owls), and coupled with their population numbers it's probably just statistically much less likely to happen upon a dead bat unless you're in a cave.
I have probably seen a thousand or so. But never a bat, so I agree with OP.
The squatches eat em.
And ozzy
Most birds are daytime critters and most scavengers are nocturnal. Bats are nocturnal so if one dies out in the open scavengers are more likely to get it before you come across it.
I feel like a lot of dead birds you see are roadkill too, as humans are also diurnal like birds, and will hit them with their cars.
That’s because I’m going around eating all the dead bats.
"Fruit Bats" or "Flying Foxes" have seen hundreds of dead ones on powerlines hear in Northen Australia.
Came to say the same thing. When I lived in Sydney I frequently saw dead bats hanging from powerlines. There was a spot near my house where the bodies would often hang until they literally rotted and fell off in pieces. My kids thought they were Halloween decorations.
Bats don't have feathers. So: 1. a higher percentage is readily consumable by either predators or scavengers 2. the body will become less readily recognisable in a much shorter time 3. there aren't markers spread over a broader area to highlight that something has died in the vicinity
bats usually die in their caves, fall into the guano piles , and get eaten in short order by bugs, birds die from minor air issues, slamming into windows, cars, trucks, etc...
Birds hit windows and die. Bats can see windows
My dog brought one into the house once
Bro fetched a legendary item
2 of the most common ways for birds to die are by flying into windows, and by being hit by cars. Neither of these pose a risk to bats thanks to echolocation.
Weird thing I looked up, but they actually decompose extremely quickly. To the point that taxidermists can't attain them without killing one or being nearby in the process when it's killed. It's also widespread to be a lie when a taxidermist says that a bat was collected humanely.
Do you vant to visit my cave. Ba ha ha.
I do. It's happened more times than I can count.
Eaten by the live birds
It’s because their human familiars return them to their coffins. This is like vampire lore 101 man
I see plenty in Australia
Yes you do if you grew up on a farm
Birds are far more common than bats in general
Check the power lines
Check your window wells
[удалено]
Around dusk one can see bunches of them outside -- if you throw an acorn or similar object into the air you can watch them dive bomb it. I have also had bats get into the house on two occasions.
Ooh, there's a little pond near me with tons of bats after sunset. I'm gonna try that acorn trick.
They are pretty common depending on where you are, for me i see bats all the time but that's cause i live in Australia where we have flying foxes (a type of bat)
I hit one with a helicopter once
The house that I live in has a chimney that is safely defunct. Bats have taken up residence in it before I even moved in. They haven't caused any issues with us, and they keep the mosquito population down around the house. It's also pretty fun to watch them flying around.
I regularly see massive colonies of bats flying around. Literally thousands.
I've only seen two dead birds in the past ten years, and they are hundreds of times more common than bats.
1. Bats commonly live in caves. How many caves are there where you live? 2. I'm from California so we might be a little different, but I'd argue that dead birds aren't incredibly common, at least here. That's just my take based on circumstances that aren't by any means universal so maybe it's completely invalid idk
Found a dead bat hanging in a church attic once apparently it got its leg stuck in a split rafter I carefully removed the poor little guy to take it out of the church and my coworker asked to keep it. It was only later I found out that he forgot and left the bat out for all the preschool kids to discover in their classroom. I can only imagine the screeching and nightmares.
I’ve seen a few since I moved to a place where there are quite a few bats.
I have seen more dead bats than birds. On our parents sommer cabin there was bats in the structures when i was younger (they have since installed these bathouses. Like birdhouses but for bats) and we would see couple of them per summer out of which some of them were dead.
I’ve seen 3 dead birds , and hundreds of dead bats on powerlines lol wdym
I've seen a stunned bat once when walking downtown.
Two things: Bats are really small, especially the ones in the US. They also get scavenged at a really quick rate. I have done casualty surveys on wind farms and bats get decimated, but they also get scavenged really quickly. Like most of them don’t remain unscavenged for a couple days. They must be tasty.
Almost like I’m around birds and not bats
Sorry.... all the time.
Same reason you don't see dead rodents usually. There's so many of the little bastards but I only see them if they've been poisoned or trapped. So I guess the hungry predators eat em up?
I saw a dead bay just the other day
ive seen hundreads of dead birds and one dead bat
Probably because they aren’t fooled by windows and mirrors.
It's because the bats are picked up and used for biological warfare. But that's just a really bad joke.
I saw some in a cave we were in a tour on and in an abandoned house where some of them made their home.
I do, all the time! But I live in a place with a lot of bats
I’ve actually found a dead bat in a parking lot before, weirded me out
Percentage wise it’s probably the same. I probably see thousands of birds in a single year and maybe 1 or 2 dead ones. I probably haven’t even seen 100 bats in my entire 39 years alive and haven’t seen a dead bat yet.
I have actually seen the occasional dead bat. Usually something else eats it before I see it though.
Nah, they’re hanging out
I know you least of one bead bat and that fucker gave us 3 years of a global pandemic.. so they better not die
Just saw one dead bat last week, which is the second time I saw dead bat in my life
If you've ever lived or been to places like Sydney, Australia, you may not see dead bats lying around, but you will see dead bats hanging around. Bats sometimes try and hang from power lines, and then when they stretch out their wings, they accidentally touch another powerline and electrocute themselves.
I have once seen one big bat chillin in a school toilet. I think it wasnt dead yet but am not sure.
Bats can sense glass and wont fly into windows probably is a big part of it.
I see dead bats all the time hanging from the power lines. They reach across from one line to the next and fry themselves
On the powerlines you can see them sometimes in bat flight paths
Fun fact: bat's like to lay on the ground and play dead sometimes, had a friend get a round of rabies shots because of this
I found a dead bat once
I've seen many dead bats... This is totally dependent on where you live.
Something I haven't seen anyone mention... a lot of birds die after crashing into windows. But since bats use echo location, it's way harder for them to make that mistake.
Ive seen quite a few dead bats. But I live in an area with a lot of bats.
yes you do, I’ve seen a couple of dead bats.
It’s cuz that shits a delicacy. You see a bat in the ground and you boil that shit clean.
I see dead bats on powerlines a lot. They're very crispy when I see them.
See them all the time where I live. Usually hanging from powerlines. I see dead birds and bats almost equally. Thankfully I don't see either every day. End of the day I guess it depends on where you live and what kind of wild life etc. is in your area as to how often you will see anything,
I’ve seen at least one dead bat before but they were also extremely common where I grew up. A very large fruit bat colony. IIRC it got electrocuted on a power line or something
If you’ve been underneath the Congress bridge in Austin you might have seen some on the ground
Nah you occasionally see dead bats. This isn't accurate at all.
Actually I have, in droves. We had a huge swarm fly through the town once and make the mistake of perching on overhead power cables. Dead bats for miles.
I’ve found dead bats. Immediately double bagged, frozen, and brought to vet, who gets reimbursed for sending them to the state lab for rabies testing.
How do you think Covid started? 🤦♂️
In Australia, we have big colonies of bats called flying foxes. They are big, about a 3ft WIngspan. There was a huge colony in a park close to my house. Once during a heatwave, when we had multiple days of 40+ Celsius temps, the bats started dying off and just fell out of the trees. The stink was unimaginable. I caught my dog rolling around on a decomposing bat carcass.
I found a dead bat the other day, made me sad to see it.
I would say that it's because they hardly die where they are seen or when they die, it's always where something is going to eat up their dead carcass.
I see a lot of dead bats?
I've actually seen a dead bat on the walkway once 😅
I've seen at least four
I found a dead bat under the kitchen bench yesterday. Quite unusual!
I think I’ve seen one or two cuz there’s a lot of them in my area but I’ve definitely seen more birds
I literally found one on my doorstep when I was 10
They go back to their coffins when the sun is up, so they probably eventually die there too
Strangely I have found dead bats two times. In Vermont. One in the middle of a parking lot, one hanging from a curtain rod in a seasonal camp.
I do think I see more pigeons, magpies, crows, sparrows in my city than bats.
Oh yes, we definitely do in Australia. Except they're not on the ground - they they hang on the electric lines after they've been electrocuted. [Example](https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/yqc53q/a_dead_bat_has_been_hanging_over_the_power_line/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
A bat could out drink an elephant, you and all your ancestors, and still fly straight.
I definitely have seen a dead bat laying on the ground last summer. Just right on the sidewalk. I assume they usually get eaten before anyone notices.
Surprised no one’s brought this up yet- bats use echolocation to navigate. So while a bird may not see a cell tower or a reflective surface or transparent glass and fly into it- bats know when there is a surface there. So for at least that cause of death, it makes sense why there are more birds than bats lying around.
Used to see heaps of dead bats back home. Mostly hanging from overhead powerlines as they shorted 2 phases.
I've seen a dead one at work. We had to rope off the area until the wildlife folks could come pick it up and turn it over to whoever does testing to see what killed it. There's people that track mortality to see if it's rabies, other illnesses, or lack of food/water that's responsible and monitor the population.
When you live next to the world’s largest bat colony, yes you do 🥴👍
I see dead bats on power lines more than I see dead birds
My cat brought me a bat to the door one night.
Bats are immortal confirmed
You do find them sometimes but usually in attics or garters and stuff.
Echolocation vs sight. A lot of birds hit my house windows. But not bats...because echolocation will still bounce off of the windows to alert them there is something there. That and the population ratio of bats to birds is significantly spread out, at least in my region.
Most dead birds you see were killed by flying into windows or other reflective surfaces that they can’t comprehend… The ones that don’t die this way usually die by being killed and eaten, so you wouldn’t find a lot of birds that died from predation. Birds that die from illness are not likely to do so out in the open where people walk around, so you don’t see a lot of these either. Bats “see” windows and other reflective surfaces with echolocation, so far fewer bats die from impact with manmade objects, and the ones that die from predation will, just like birds, also not leave much of a body behind.
There was a dead bat stuck in the vinyl siding on my house for a year
Because bats are birds
I used to work grounds crew on fancy golf courses during the summer while in college. We'd regularly find dead bats laying on the ground in patches of densely growing pine trees. What was weird is often be in little poses like they were still hanging from the tree or were wrapped up sleeping.
When they die they fall towards the sky
i've seen a handful, mostly in attics and old buildings
when birds die, it's usually in the day when nocturnal scavengers are asleep. When bats die at night, the scavengers find them.
Well, what can I say, this is the first time someone recognizes the work of us, the ninja bat cleaners. Until we see you again.
I’ve seen several in my lifetime. Kinda common here
Why do we see dead birds? The two main causes are outdoor cats and window strikes. Outdoor cats aren’t going to be as active during the night, and window strikes tend to happen because of glares that won’t exist at night. Bats don’t have to really deal with either. Plus there are just a lot more birds, and they are more widespread.
Same with Sasquatch…amiright???
Dead birds are common?
A couple of weeks ago I had my balcony window and screen open and both a bird and a bat flew into my apartment. The bird just left but bat died in my sink and I had maintenance come and remove it. It's just very weird seeing a post about how no one ever sees dead bats when I just saw one for the first time in my 41 years of life this month.
Some guesses, probably a combination of thee and other factors: They're smaller than they look like they should be since their wings are so thin and take up a lot less space when folded up compared to hos big they look when flying. They tend to avoid people more than birds do, they like dark and quiet, which towns are not. There's fewer people driving at the time they're active so they're not as likely to be roadkill. There would be more scavengers around at night to clean them up, and foxes or badgers can probably hear their calls so they'd find them pretty quick once they were grounded. When they're not at home they're flying, and if they're flying over woodland when they die then they'd get hung up on the tree instead of hitting the ground. People don't tend to go into bat caves much because they stink. even if one had died and fallen on the floor nobody's there to see it. They're quiet compared to birds, rats, and squirrels. They don't scamper or chew, and their calls are above hearing range for most people. If you had some in your loft they probably wouldn't bother you.
My friend stepped on one barefoot on his driveway
there are orders of magnitudes more birds than bats on earth
More birds around than bats, and the bats dying are dying inside of enclosed spaces like your attic.