Bats can catch and eat birds mid-flight. A painter may have known that 400 years before scientists

Europe’s biggest bat is capable of an impressively athletic feat: snatching birds out of the air and eating them, mid-flight — something a painter seems to have noticed hundreds of years before scientists.

Researchers first proved this snacking-while-flying behaviour exists last year. Now, ecologists have deduced more evidence of that appetite, hiding in plain sight for more than 400 years in a painting by 17th-century Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder. 

The research was published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mirjam Knörnschild, who studies animal behaviour at Humboldt University in Berlin, called the study a “very clever piece of natural history detective work.”

“The article beautifully connects modern high-tech research with historical art, and it demonstrates that valuable biological observations can sometimes be hidden in unexpected places,” Knörnschild, who was not involved in the research, said in an email.

Observation or imagination?

In the painting, titled Air, more than 60 types of birds fly over the canvas alongside three different species of bats. In the upper right corner is what researcher Miguel Clavero and colleagues believe is a large noctule bat — and clasped in its jaws is a limp-looking songbird.

Clavero, who had initially set out to catalogue every animal Brueghel depicted in the painting, is not a bat expert. So he consulted a researcher who studies noctule bats.

“We went to them and said, ‘Hey, can that be a noctule bat eating a bird?’ and they were totally excited,” Clavero, an ecologist with the Spanish National Research Council and a co-author on the new study, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

The quest for proof of greater noctule bats’ capability to catch and eat birds began back in 2001, when researchers spotted bird feathers in bat feces — a clue that the bats had a taste for prey larger than insects.

Last year, scientists proved the behaviour exists by taking a comparatively more high-tech approach: putting small “backpacks” on greater noctule bats and recording their movements and vocalizations.

“And then we came with this painting… and they [were] totally shocked, like we were,” Clavero said. “It’s very fascinating.”

Clavero says Brueghel the Elder appears to have come by the knowledge of the bats’ hunting behaviour somehow, but he and other experts generally agree the painter probably never saw the hunt happen.

“It is possible, of course, but I would be surprised. As far as we know, this behaviour usually happens at night and often high in the air,” Knörnschild said. 

“But I do think the detail may have been inspired by real natural-history knowledge. For instance, he may have seen a bat associated with bird feathers.”

Like the poop-studying scientists, Clavero says the painter may have observed bird remains around bat colonies.

Brueghel the Elder “was a mix between a very experienced naturalist and a very prolific painter,” Clavero said. “He imagined how the bat could handle the bird.”

But not everyone is convinced the painter used art to imitate life.

Fiona Mathews, an environmental biologist at the University of Sussex, says Brueghel “was part of a painting dynasty famous for paintings full of all sorts of grotesques and weird symbolism.”

The painter, she says, may have come across different species of bats in menageries or collections belonging to his wealthy patrons, and simply decided to add a detail that would have been intriguing to 17th-century viewers of his work.

“Some of his paintings feature curious creatures such as a two-headed bird and a human head with legs,” she told CBC News in an email. “Whether the bat eating a bird in the painting was based on natural history knowledge that was subsequently lost is, I think, unclear. “

If Brueghel the Elder really has taken an observation from the real world onto the canvas, it’s a promising sign there are more discoveries to be made about wildlife by simply looking at historical art, said Danilo Russo, an ecologist at the University of Naples Federico II.

“For me, the importance of this discovery lies not only in the possibility that Brueghel may have depicted a bird-eating bat four centuries ago,” Russo, who wasn’t involved in the research, said in an email.

“It also lies in the painting, inviting us to think differently about historical biodiversity, what has been lost, and how much natural history may still be hidden in plain sight.

“I suspect there are many more surprises waiting to be uncovered in paintings, manuscripts and other historical sources.”