BATS that go swimming and voles that fly. It sounds like The Wind in the
Willows gone mad. But that’s the mystery which confronted
researchers tracking mammals in the English countryside.
Katie Parsons of Bristol University was following Daubenton’s bats tagged
with radio transmitters along the Kennet and Avon Canal in Somerset. “They fly
swiftly over a stretch of water, taking insects from the surface with their
feet,” she says. “But one night the signals showed a bat moving at water level,
very slowly. And it was gradually joined by others.”
Researchers from Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit also…
