400-year-old painting reveals a bat's secret diet

Natural historians have many observational techniques in their toolkit for learning about the natural world: tagging animals with tracking devices, recording sounds, analyzing droppings or simply watching and counting. As ...

Through new research published in PNAS , a team led by Pedro Romero-Vidal at the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, has uncovered evidence that has been hiding in plain sight for centuries in a Baroque-era painting. The greater noctule bat is Europe's largest bat species—and in 2001, researchers examining thousands of fecal pellets found feathers from dozens of songbird species, suggesting the bats were eating birds rather than just insects. However, it wasn't until 2025 that this was confirmed directly.

In this study, bats fitted with tiny tracking tags were recorded diving to snatch migrating songbirds midflight, then feeding on their catch for up to 20 minutes without ever landing. Evidence from the past In their study, Romero-Vidal's team weren't initially looking for bats at all. Rather, they were cataloging animals depicted in an allegorical work painted in 1611 by the Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder, now digitized in a high-resolution image. Depicting more than 60 bird species and three varieties of bat, they predicted that the painting captures a valuable snapshot of the wildlife known to the painter.

(A) The canvas Air painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder in 1611, an allegory of the air element. (B) Bat of the genus Plecotus. (C) Bats, probably belonging to the family Vespertilionidae. (D) Bat likely representing a greater noctule (Nyctalus lasiopterus) with a songbird caught on its mouth while flying. (E) Plecotus austriacus, coinciding with the genus represented on panel B. (F) Pipistrellus kuhlii, a vespertilionid bat that exemplifies the morphological type represented in panel C. (G) Nyctalus lasiopterus in flight, as the individual represented on panel D. Photographs by Daniel Fernández (E) and Elena Tena (F and G). Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2536525123 Read more

A greater noctule bat. Credit: Elena Tena. Read more