An Unusual Dinner: Scientists Recorded A Falcon Hunting Bats At Dusk

A Crow-Sized Falcon Made Over 100 Attempts to Catch Bats in Half an Hour. It Succeeded at Least Eight Times.

At dusk on October 12, 2025, along a lagoon on the western coast of Greece, a Eurasian Hobby, a small, fast-flying falcon about the size of a crow, did something that stopped a researcher in his tracks. The falcon chased and caught bats, one after another, eating each one while still airborne, and it did this at least eight times in half an hour.

Researchers have occasionally reported hobbies catching bats before, but those accounts have been rare and mostly anecdotal. What sets this observation apart is the sheer number of documented captures in a single session and the detailed data on how the bird hunted. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Raptor Research, a single juvenile hobby made somewhere between 100 and 120 hunting attempts during that half-hour window, consuming each catch while still airborne.

Located in western Greece, Messolonghi-Aitoliko National Park is the largest lagoon system in the eastern Mediterranean. Protected under international conservation agreements, it serves as a key resting stop for migrating birds traveling between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. That evening turned out to be a remarkable collision of timing and circumstance: the hobby was passing through, and the observer estimated that thousands of bats were, too.

The Hunt Begins at Dusk

Apostolos Christopoulos, a researcher from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, was conducting field observations on the east side of Aitoliko town when he spotted four hobbies in the area. One bird, a juvenile identifiable by a distinctively bent tail feather sticking upward, stayed within sight for most of the 30-minute session and became the focus of his attention.

Bats, identified as likely belonging to the Pipistrellus genus, a group of small, common bats typically weighing between 3 and 10 grams, had begun emerging from the town’s stone buildings and tiled roofs around 6:20 in the evening. They streamed eastward over the lagoon toward surrounding farmland. Bat activity peaked between 7:00 and 7:05 p.m., with an estimated 10 to 120 individual bats crossing the observation area every minute. Over the course of an hour, Christopoulos estimated that 2,700 to 3,000 bats passed through the area. At peak emergence, the hobby wasted no time.

How a Falcon Hunts Bats Mid-Air

Hunting between roughly 6:50 and 7:20 p.m., right around local sunset, the focal bird worked an area of about 27 to 30 hectares over the lagoon and the edge of town, flying at an estimated altitude of 70 to 120 meters. About 90% of its hunting attempts involved aerial chases lasting between 7 and 27 seconds each. When a bat escaped, the hobby typically pivoted immediately to the next one nearby.

Each successful catch followed the same pattern: the hobby grabbed the bat with its talons, then raised a foot to its beak and bent its head downward, consuming the prey in flight over roughly 1 to 1.5 minutes. Wing remains and other scraps were dropped mid-air, most falling into the lagoon below. Christopoulos observed between eight and ten successful captures during the session, with a small margin of uncertainty from a roughly 90-second window when the bird moved out of his line of sight.

Why This Behavior Rarely Gets Documented

Bat predation by hobbies has been noted in scattered reports across Europe and Africa, but solid numbers on attack rates, capture success, and hunting behavior have been hard to come by because this behavior typically happens in low-light conditions. This paper provides an unusually detailed account.

Christopoulos suggests that stopover sites like Messolonghi-Aitoliko, which sit along major migration corridors and support large bat populations, may give migrating hobbies a useful energy boost during their long journey from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa. Catching even eight small bats in one session likely gave the bird a meaningful caloric boost at a critical point in the trip.

Stone buildings with tiled roofs give bats abundant roosting space in the town, while the adjacent wetland provides rich feeding grounds. That combination concentrates bats in predictable flight paths along the town’s edge and over the water, creating ideal hunting conditions for a fast, agile predator.

Globally, more than 140 species of daytime-hunting raptors are known to prey on bats, with over 1,500 individual predation events on record. But evidence that this is common or regular behavior for the Eurasian Hobby in Europe remains thin. No current evidence suggests bats make up a routine part of the hobby’s diet in Europe; this appears to be opportunistic behavior, not a specialized hunting strategy.

A Single Observer, a Single Night, But a Notable One

Christopoulos is careful about what one 30-minute observation can tell us. This was one bird, at one location, on one October evening, and whether this kind of bat-hunting blitz is a regular occurrence for hobbies passing through the region remains an open question.

Still, the data gathered that evening are more precise than most previous accounts. Four hobbies were present at the same site simultaneously, suggesting this particular wetland-urban edge habitat was drawing in multiple migrating birds at once. Protecting wetland and urban mosaic habitats that support both bats and migrating falcons may help preserve the kinds of stopover feeding opportunities that birds rely on during long journeys.

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