A long spell of inclement weather seems to have wreaked havoc on California’s bats, reports the Sacramento Bee. “Emaciated and seemingly exhausted, bats are landing in yards around Northern California, possibly starving as a consequence of the cold, wet spring,” reporter Edie Lay wrote on April 23. Dharma Webber, founder of the California Native Bat Conservancy, told the newspaper that weather reduced the number of flying insects on which the bats depend. All bat species found in the Sacramento area feed on flying insects ...more

A bat from Siberia has set the world’s longevity record for small mammals, a feat that has grabbed the attention of scientists who study aging in humans.

The male Brandt’s myotis is at least 41 years old. Recently recaptured from the wild, the bat bore a numbered band that had been attached by researchers who captured and banded 1,544 bats near caves in the Siberian region of Russia in the 1960s....more

An assortment of bats, their natural habitats disappearing, now share the cities of Romania with human urban-dwellers. But most Romanians detest their new neighbors. With little accurate information available, old myths breed baseless fears, and bats are deliberately killed whenever possible. Newspapers recently praised the killing of more than 200 bats when a stadium was remodeled. ...more