Brown Long Eared Bat - Courtesy of Wikipedia
The 'Long-eared bat' (Plecotus auritus) is a fairly large European bat. It has distinctive ears, long and with a distinctive fold.
An adult brown long-eared bat has a body length of 4.5-4.8 cm, a tail of 4.1-4.6 cm, and a wing length of 4-4.2 cm. The ears are 3.3-3.9 cm in length, and readily distinguish this from most other bat species.
They are relatively slow flyers compared to other bat species.
Habitat[]
It is found across northern Eurasia, from England and France to Korea and Japan. The UK distribution can be found on the National Biodiversity Network website and can be seen.
This species appears to prefer caves as roosting sites, but roosts in trees holes, buildings and bat boxes as well. The roosts in trees may be close to the ground.
It hunts above woodland, often by day, and mostly for moths, gleaning insects from leaves and bark. This is one of the bats for which eyesight is more important than echolocation in finding prey (Stevens 2005).
Echolocation[]
Echolocation is used to find prey. The frequencies used by this bat species for echolocation lie between 27-56 kHz, have most energy at 45 kHz and have an average duration of 2.5 ms.