A 1611 Renaissance painting captured a bat eating a bird 400 years before scientists fully documented it

Bats are the only mammals that can fly, and flight is energetically expensive. Most bats meet this need by eating vast quantities of insects each night. But scientists have now confirmed that one bat species has found a richer meal besides it: birds.

But according to a study, ‘Natural history on canvas: Brueghel knew about bird-eating noctule bats,’ published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this is nothing new. A 1611 painting by Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder appears to show a greater noctule bat carrying a bird in flight, more than four centuries before scientists confirmed that this actually occurs. If that is correct, it means an artist captured a genuine piece of natural history long before scientists were able to prove it.

The bat that hunts birds in mid-air
The notion of a bat eating birds was long thought to be far-fetched. Bird-eating bats were thought to be tropical, where they would occasionally snatch birds that were resting, not birds in flight. A bat actively chasing down birds mid-flight at night seemed almost too strange to be real.


That started to change in 2001. According to another study, ‘Bat predation on nocturnally migrating birds,’ published in PNAS, researchers analyzed more than 14,000 fecal pellets collected from greater noctule bats in Spain and found that this species regularly captures and eats large numbers of migrating songbirds, making it the only bat species known at the time to prey on birds on a recurring basis. The proof was not a photo. It was feathers that kept showing up in bat droppings.

But it would be another two decades before we actually saw a bat snatch a bird from the air. Scientists only saw the greater noctule bat catch songbirds directly out of the sky last fall, according to Science News, which used tracking devices and acoustic monitoring to watch the behavior in real time. This same milestone is described in the PNAS painting study, which states that a combination of biologging, acoustic monitoring, and molecular analysis provided the first direct evidence that greater noctules capture and eat migrating birds in flight.

Hiding in plain sight in a 17th-century painting
Brueghel's painting, titled "Air," is part of a series on the four elements, and centers on the Greek muse Urania. The PNAS study says the canvas is replete with detailed depictions of more than 60 bird species and three distinct bat species.

Most of those bats are just part of the scenery. But according to Science News, one bat in the upper right of the canvas seems to be a greater noctule bat, with a songbird in its jaws.

Researchers are careful not to oversell this finding. The PNAS study notes that the painting can't be used as scientific proof that Brueghel saw the behavior himself, as it could be a reflection of artistic convention or imagination. Still, the detail is there. Of the bats on the canvas, only the noctule is shown holding prey, and the study’s authors say this pattern “suggests an observational inspiration rather than purely symbolic convention.”

Why Brueghel might have known something
But how could a 17th-century painter working mainly out of Brussels know about a behavior modern science only confirmed last year? Geography offers a hint.

The Greater noctule bats are rare in Belgium. But Brueghel had travelled in Italy, where the species is much more common. Scientists involved in the study suggest that people living near these bats may have noticed bird feathers in their droppings centuries ago, reaching the same conclusion that scientists identified in 2001 without any lab equipment.

What a centuries-old painting can teach modern science
Beyond the bat itself, this discovery suggests something even more profound: the paintings hanging in museums can double as records of the natural world, waiting to be reinterpreted with modern eyes. According to Science News, one of the researchers involved said the finding shows that art “can be a valuable source of natural history information.”

The greater noctule is currently an anomaly among bats, the only species that has been confirmed to hunt birds in mid-flight instead of insects. And thanks to a Flemish painter with a sharp eye, that detail may have gone unnoticed for centuries.