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Who Am I?
Answer: Little Brown Bat (Myotis lucifigus)
The Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture - www.washington.edu/burkemuseum
The little brown bat (or little brown Myotis) is the most common kind of bat living in British Columbia. Bats are particularly amazing mammals because they are the only mammals that can really fly. Like all other bats in British Columbia, the little brown bat eats insects and finds its food using echolocation. To use echolocation, it makes a very high squeaking sound (which human ears usually cannot hear) that bounces off objects and comes back to it. By using this sound, or sonar signal, the bat can tell the size of its prey and how far away it is.
Little brown bats mostly eat insects that hatch out of the water (like mosquitoes), so they like to hang out in open areas, usually over water. In the summer, after dark, you can see bats flying over Beaver Lake and Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Sometimes people even see them flying in their own backyards!
