A 17th-century painting upends a zoology textbook: how Jan Brueghel the Elder recorded bat predation 400 years early

On a copper-coloured panel painted in Antwerp around 1626, a barn owl pins a small mammal to the ground while other rodents scatter across the canvas. Look closer at the predator's catch and the painting refuses to behave. The dead animal has the proportions of a bat, with folded wings wrapped around its body, and the image sits among the earliest European depictions of an aerial hunter seizing a bat in flight or at roost. Researchers writing in the Russian science outlet NPlusOne argue that Jan Brueghel the Elder, the Flemish master of meticulous still lifes and crowded natural-history tableaux, may have recorded an instance of owl-on-bat predation roughly four centuries before zoology caught up with him.

The claim is deliberately modest. NPlusOne frames the identification as an assumption, not a confirmed field observation. But the painting, part of Brueghel's late workshop production and long catalogued as a generic owl-and-rodent scene, is now being read as a data point: a glimpse of predator-prey behaviour captured in oil and pigment decades before naturalists thought to look for it. The finding is a reminder that Brueghel, who died in 1625, has always been treated as a decorator of cabinets of curiosity, not as a contributor to the empirical record. Recent attention suggests the second framing has been overdue.

The painting, and what it shows

Brueghel's late canvases are dense to the point of vertigo. He filled his pictures with hundreds of individually rendered insects, birds, blossoms and small mammals, often working from specimens supplied by Antwerp's trading networks and the imperial collections in Brussels. The barn-owl scene, painted within his workshop orbit around 1626, follows that template: a central raptor with outspread wings, a scattering of mice and voles across the foreground, and a clutch of smaller fauna arranged like an inventory at the picture's edges. The crucial detail sits beneath the owl's talons.

The prey animal is rendered with a wingspan that exceeds its body length, a domed skull, and what appears to be a folded wing membrane hugging the torso. To a modern eye, that morphology is closer to a bat than to any of the rodent species Brueghel typically included. NPlusOnline's reconstruction of the figure as a noctule-like bat is what animates the new reading, and it places the image in conversation with two species whose European ranges overlap Brueghel's Antwerp: the common noctule, Nyctalus noctula, and its larger relative Nyctalus lasiopterus, the giant noctule, the largest bat in Europe's predator guild, and a species not formally described until the nineteenth century.

What the zoology record actually says

The common noctule is a tree-dwelling insectivore that emerges at dusk to hawk beetles and moths over forest canopy and water. The giant noctule, by contrast, is a partial migrant with a wingspan that can exceed 45 centimetres, recorded across much of continental Europe and into North Africa and the Caucasus. Its dietary profile is the relevant fact for Brueghel's purposes: documented studies in Iberia and southern France have shown giant noctules preying on migrating passerines, a finding that forced a quiet rewrite of the assumption that European bats were strict insectivores.

That rewrite is itself recent. For most of the twentieth century, field guides treated the giant noctule as a large aerial insect hunter. Camera, radar and pellet analyses over the last two decades have shifted the picture: the species is now known to take small birds on the wing, at least seasonally, and to overlap roost sites with owls and other raptors that share its forest habitat. The published range maps for Nyctalus lasiopterus include Belgium, where Antwerp sits, as part of the species' broader European distribution, even if the local population is poorly surveyed.

Why an owl catching a bat is unusual

Most European owls hunt rodents, shrews and small birds. Bat captures are documented but rare, and they are concentrated in owl species that hunt at dusk and dawn, when bats are commuting between roosts and feeding grounds. The barn owl in Brueghel's panel is depicted in daylight-bright conditions, not the half-light of twilight, and the surrounding fauna (the rodents, the insects, the bright ground) belong to a midday tableau.

That mismatch is what makes the image analytically interesting, and what keeps the claim cautious. If Brueghel was working from life, he may have witnessed a diurnal roost disturbance, a sick or grounded bat, or a moment staged by the workshop for compositional balance. If he was working from other pictures and stuffed specimens, the bat reading becomes harder to sustain. NPlusOnline's piece treats the identification as the most parsimonious reading of the morphology, not as a closed case.

The four-hundred-year gap

Formal European bat biology begins with naturalists like Ulisse Aldrovandi and Conrad Gessner in the mid-sixteenth century, both of whom catalogued bats as winged rodents or as curiosities of the night. Systematic predation studies on European bat species, including nocturnal raptor interactions, are a twentieth-century preoccupation, built around mist-netting, radio telemetry and, more recently, stable-isotope analysis. The Brueghel panel, if the bat reading holds, would predate the closest modern observations by roughly four centuries, a gap that historians of science tend to find embarrassing in retrospect.

It also reframes Brueghel. He has long sat in the art-historical literature as a compiler of nature's inventory: a painter of cabinets of curiosity who translated specimens into image, but not a contributor to the record of animal behaviour. A predator-prey event, rendered with anatomical care, is a different kind of claim. It suggests that the Antwerp workshop observed, not merely catalogued, and that the resulting canvases carry more empirical weight than the decorative frame around them has invited.

What to watch next

The NPlusOnline piece will draw scrutiny from mammalogists and art historians in roughly equal measure. The next move is straightforward: high-resolution multispectral imaging of the panel to confirm the wing-folding and skull morphology beneath the varnish, followed by a comparative survey of other Brueghel workshop canvases from the same period. Several of those paintings include owls and other raptors, and at least one is reported to contain a mammal whose silhouette sits awkwardly between rodent and bat. If a second image confirms the pattern, the 1626 panel stops being an isolated curiosity and becomes the earliest securely dated European record of an owl taking a bat, drawn from life by a painter whose name is not in any zoology textbook.

For now, the finding is provisional, and the report treats it that way. That is the correct posture. A four-hundred-year head start is the kind of claim that earns either a quiet footnote or a quiet embarrassment, and the difference is set by the next image examined.

Sources:

• NPlusOne, Telegram channel, https://t.me/nplusone/
• Wikipedia, Nyctalus lasiopterus, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyctalus_lasiopterus
• Wikipedia, Jan Brueghel the Elder, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Brueghel_the_Elder
• Wikipedia, Giant noctule, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_noctule

Desk note: Monexus framed this as a science-meets-art-history beat, the painting as a data point rather than a curiosity. We resisted dramatising Brueghel as a forgotten naturalist, and reported the identification as an assumption per NPlusOnline, not as proof.