Which species of bat?

BatGood day,

In November 2015 we went to Namibia.  In Etosha National Park we could take a picture of a bat, hanging in a tree.  We are not experts in bats but we think this might be a Schlieffen’s Twilight Bat.  Can someone help us to identify this species of bat?

Thank you

Kind regards

Jean-Philippe

Belgium

4 Comments

  • cmh78

    I am not at home, so don’t have my books, but glancing over the Namibia species list and then a quick use of Google Image (which can be untrustworthy for bats) it appears you have a Commerson’s Leaf-nosed Bat, Hipposideros marungensis.

    • vnsankar

      I also think it looks like a Hipposideros. Hipposideros taxonomy was reworked a few years back, so now Commerson’s is endemic to Madagascar. The possible candidates for Etosha would be H. caffer and H. vittatus. Perhaps it is H. vittatus (doesn’t look like H. caffer to me).

  • AfriBats

    That’s indeed Hipposideros vittatus (formerly synonymized under H. commersonii, and H. marungensis being a proper synonym of H. vittatus.

    These are probably migratory bats, and we’d appreciated seeing this observations shared with the AfriBats project on iNaturalist at http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/afribats

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