Head to head
Owl vs Bat
Owls and bats are both creatures of the night sky, both fly, both roost by day, and both are wrapped in the same folklore of witches and haunted houses. But one is a bird and the other a mammal, and the way each solves the problem of hunting in the dark could hardly be more different.
| Owl | Bat | |
|---|---|---|
| Bird or mammal | Bird (Strigiformes) | Mammal (Chiroptera) |
| Wings | Feathered, fringed for silence | Skin membrane over long finger bones |
| Main hunting sense | Low-light vision plus directional hearing | Echolocation, in most species |
| Main prey | Small mammals, birds, insects | Insects; also fruit, nectar, fish, or blood by species |
| Young | Lays eggs | Gives birth to live young and nurses them |
| Body covering | Feathers | Fur |
| Number of species | Around 250 | Around 1,470, one in five mammals |
| A modern threat | Secondary poisoning from rodent baits | White-nose disease and wind turbines |
Owl vs Bat: common questions
Do owls and bats hunt the same way?
No, and this is the most interesting difference between them. An owl hunts primarily by sensing what is already there: its enormous eyes gather every scrap of available light, and its offset ears, funnelled by the facial disc, pinpoint the rustle of a mouse in both direction and distance, so the owl can locate prey by sight, by sound, or by both, and glides in on silent wings. A bat, in most species, hunts by actively probing the darkness with sound: it emits a stream of ultrasonic calls and interprets the echoes bouncing back, effectively lighting up its surroundings with sound and reading the reflections finely enough to detect a single flying insect and track its movements. One listens; the other calls and listens to its own echoes.
Are bats blind and do owls see in total darkness?
Both are exaggerations. No bat is blind; every bat has working eyes, and the large fruit bats have excellent vision and no echolocation at all, while even the small echolocating bats can see and often use vision alongside sound. And an owl cannot see in total darkness, because there is no such thing as seeing with no light; what an owl has is a retina so sensitive that it can make out shapes in light levels far too dim for a human, and in genuine pitch blackness it falls back on hearing, which is precise enough for some species to catch prey by sound alone. So a better summary is that bats see fine but add sound, and owls see extremely well in low light and add hearing.
Do owls eat bats?
Yes, where their ranges and activity times overlap. Bats are the right size for many medium and large owls, and an owl waiting near the mouth of a cave or a roost building at dusk can pick off bats as they stream out, catching them in flight with its talons. Studies of owl pellets from caves used by both animals regularly turn up bat bones. It is not usually a large part of an owl's diet, which is dominated by rodents, but for some owls in some places bats are a regular seasonal food. Snakes, hawks, and even other bats also take bats, so leaving the roost is one of the more dangerous moments in a bat's day.