A common bird in Europe, the great tit tends to stick to insects and seeds as a food source with caterpillars as a particular favorite. However, a new paper in Biology Letters found that the song bird employs unique feeding behavior in a cave in Hungary: they kill and eat hibernating pipistrelle bats. This is the first instance ever recorded of a song bir preying on bats.
The great tits only prey on the bats in the winter when food is scarce and the bats are easy targets. The great tits wait outside caves for the bats to start making noises on waking. The great tits then hunt while the bats are still woozy, pecking them to death.
“It doesn’t look like this is an overwhelming thing that threatens the bat population,” Bjorn Siemers a member of the research team from the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, told the BBC. “So then the question to ask is ‘how do they invent it?’, and so far we can only speculate – it could be a kind of cultural learning.”
There have been other reports of great tits possibly preying on bats in Sweden and Poland, meaning that the behavior may not be localized.
While great tits are small, about 5 inches long, pipistrelle bats are even smaller, measuring only an inch or two in length.
Testing if ‘bat’ was a preferable meal, researchers left out other kinds of food—sunflowers seeds and bacon. On the days they did this the great tits generally left the bats alone meaning that they likely only hunt bats when hunger drives them to it.
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