Field Observation

A Painted Bat observed roosting within a banana plantation in Kodagu, hanging from a dry rolled leaf or plant stem with wings partially spread, displaying the species' extraordinary orange and black patterning. The bat's vivid colouration — deep black wing membranes bisected by bold orange veining along the finger bones — is clearly visible against the green plantation understorey. This colouration, unique among Indian bat species, is believed to function as camouflage within dry rolled leaves and dead plant material where the species characteristically roosts during daylight hours.

The Painted Bat (Kerivoula picta) is one of the most visually striking mammals found in South and Southeast Asia, ranging from India and Sri Lanka east through Myanmar, Thailand and into Indonesia. In India it is associated primarily with forest edges, plantations and wooded agricultural landscapes — precisely the habitat mosaic that characterises working estates in the Western Ghats. Despite its extraordinary appearance the Painted Bat is rarely encountered, as its roosting habit of hanging within curled dead leaves renders it almost perfectly concealed during the day. A sighting of this species in the field is genuinely uncommon.

The species belongs to the genus Kerivoula, commonly known as woolly bats, characterised by their densely furred bodies and highly ornamented wing membranes. The Painted Bat is the most visually distinctive member of this group, its orange and black colouration having no parallel among Indian mammals. It feeds exclusively on insects, hunting at low levels within forest understorey and plantation interiors after dark. The banana plantation habitat visible in this photograph — with its dense leaf canopy, abundant dead and drying leaf material and high insect diversity — provides ideal roosting and foraging conditions for this species.

The presence of the Painted Bat on a working estate in Kodagu is ecologically significant. It indicates a plantation landscape with sufficient structural complexity — dead leaves, mixed vegetation layers, low chemical pressure — to support a species with highly specific roosting requirements. Like the Malabar Pit Viper and the Ruddy Mongoose, the Painted Bat is not merely passing through the estate but living within it, dependent on the conditions the working landscape maintains.

This record, photographed by Dilan Mandanna in a banana plantation in Coorg, is among the more remarkable sightings in the Wild Estates archive — a bat of extraordinary beauty, hidden in plain sight within a working agricultural landscape.