Most bats can walk, but the majority do it poorly. On a flat surface, a typical bat looks like a person trying to crawl with ski poles strapped to their arms: the elongated finger bones that support the wing membrane make for awkward, ungainly limbs on the ground. A handful of species, though, have evolved genuinely impressive ground locomotion, including one that can sprint. The gap between the worst and best bat walkers is enormous and tells a fascinating story about what happens when a flying animal needs to get around without flying.
What Walking Looks Like for an Ordinary Bat
When researchers place a small insect-eating bat on a flat surface, the animal’s first instinct is usually to take off. If it can’t, it resorts to a shuffling crawl that uses the thumb claws on its folded wings as forward anchors while the hind feet push the body along. This is a diagonally alternating gait, meaning the bat moves its front-left and back-right limbs roughly together, then switches. The thumb claws point sideways rather than gripping forward, so they don’t pull the bat ahead the way a hand might. Instead, they act more like stabilizing posts while the hind legs do most of the pushing.
The result is slow and wobbly. A bat on the ground is at a severe disadvantage compared to almost any other small mammal of similar size. Its hind legs are rotated outward (the knees point backward and to the sides, rather than forward) because the leg bones anchor the wing membrane. That rotation is essential for flight control but terrible for walking, and it means most bats can’t manage anything faster than a clumsy shuffle on a flat surface.
The Vampire Bat’s Bounding Sprint
Common vampire bats are the dramatic exception. In 2005, researchers at Cornell showed that these blood-feeding bats don’t just walk on the ground; they can break into a full run using a bounding gait unlike anything seen in other mammals. In most running animals, the hind legs generate the main propulsive force. Vampire bats flip the script: their powerful wing muscles drive the forelimbs, which push the body upward and forward in explosive bounds while the hind legs simply stabilize and steer.
This forelimb-powered run evolved independently from running in other mammals. When researchers measured the forces involved, they found that the vampire bat’s terrestrial locomotion produces force patterns that are, in a sense, the reverse of what you’d see in a dog or a rat. The forelimbs bear the brunt of both the vertical and forward thrust, and the bat generates relatively high sideways forces as well, reflecting the unusual outward rotation of its limbs.
Vampire bats need this ground agility because of how they feed. They land near a sleeping host (often livestock), approach on the ground, and use heat-sensing pits on their nose to find a spot where blood vessels run close to the skin. If the animal stirs, the bat needs to scurry away fast or risk being crushed. Their bounding run lets them cover ground quickly and launch into flight from a sprint. The launch itself is explosive: vampire bats can generate a vertical force nearly ten times their body weight in about 30 milliseconds, reaching a takeoff speed of roughly 2.4 meters per second.
New Zealand’s Ground-Dwelling Bat
If the vampire bat is the sprinter of the bat world, the New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat (Mystacina tuberculata) is the marathon hiker. This species is one of only two land mammals native to New Zealand (the other being another bat species), and it evolved in an environment with almost no ground-dwelling predatory mammals. With that ecological niche wide open, the short-tailed bat became a dedicated ground forager, spending substantial time walking along the forest floor and even burrowing into leaf litter to find insects, fruit, nectar, and pollen.
Its gait is fundamentally different from the vampire bat’s. On a treadmill, the short-tailed bat uses a steady lateral-sequence walk, meaning it moves each leg in a predictable order rather than bounding. At all speeds tested, the bat kept at least three limbs on the ground at a time, with no aerial phase. As speed increased, the hind limbs moved faster, but the forelimbs kept a steady pace. The body bobbed up and down unpredictably, suggesting the bat lacks the finely tuned mechanical energy recovery that makes walking efficient in many ground mammals.
Anatomically, the short-tailed bat has features that clearly support terrestrial life. Its humerus (upper arm bone) has distinctive bony ridges shared with a fossil relative from Australia dating back roughly 20 million years, suggesting that ground-based locomotion in this lineage is ancient rather than a recent adaptation to New Zealand’s unusual ecology. The species also has thick, leathery wing membranes that fold tightly against the body when not in use, and robust thumb and toe claws that grip the substrate as it walks.
Fruit Bats and Insect Bats Move Differently on the Ground
Not all bats are equally helpless when grounded. Researchers who compared the walking and climbing behavior of larger fruit bats (megachiropterans) with smaller insect-eating bats (microchiropterans) found striking differences. When placed on a horizontal surface, the insect-eating bats typically tried to fly immediately or else scurried along using that characteristic diagonal shuffle. The fruit bats, by contrast, moved more deliberately.
One measure of the difference is speed. In lab tests, an insect-eating bat (Nycticeius humeralis) walked at about 1.5 body-lengths per second, while a straw-coloured fruit bat (Eidolon helvum) climbed at about 2.2 body-lengths per second, roughly a third faster. Interestingly, the fruit bats cycled their limbs faster during climbing than during horizontal walking, while the insect-eating bats did the opposite. This likely reflects the fact that large fruit bats spend a great deal of time clambering around tree branches to reach fruit, so their musculature and coordination are better tuned for climbing than for flat-ground walking.
The practical takeaway: if you find a grounded fruit bat, it will probably be more mobile and coordinated on the ground than a grounded insect-eating bat of similar size. Neither will be fast by mammalian standards, but the fruit bat is less likely to just flail helplessly.
How Bats Get Airborne from the Ground
One reason walking matters so little to most bats is that they have a surprisingly effective way to skip past it entirely. When a grounded bat needs to take off, it doesn’t run to build speed the way a bird might. Instead, it performs a powerful jump using its wing muscles. Researchers who filmed takeoffs in five different bat species found they all used essentially the same technique: the bat pushes off the ground with the wrist joint at the base of its wing, often with its feet already in the air before the jump is complete.
This is a genuinely impressive feat of power. The wings are the strongest muscles in a bat’s body, so the jump generates far more force than the hind legs could manage alone. The bat essentially does a plyometric push-up at explosive speed, launching itself high enough to unfurl its wings and begin flapping. For most species, this takes a fraction of a second, and the bat goes from lying flat on the ground to airborne without any running start.
This jump-to-fly ability is part of why walking never faced strong evolutionary pressure in most bat lineages. If you can vault into the air from a standstill, there’s little benefit to being a good walker. The species that did evolve strong ground locomotion are the ones where walking provides access to something flight alone can’t reach: sleeping hosts on the ground, for vampire bats, or prey buried in leaf litter, for the New Zealand short-tailed bat.
Bats That Hunt on the Ground
Beyond the specialists, a broader group of bat species regularly interacts with the ground surface as part of a foraging strategy called substrate gleaning. These bats fly low, detect prey on the ground or on vegetation using a combination of echolocation, passive listening for prey sounds, and sometimes vision, then swoop down to snatch the target. Some land briefly; others grab prey on the wing without fully touching down.
The pallid bat of western North America is one well-studied example. It hunts scorpions, beetles, and other ground-dwelling arthropods, relying heavily on the sounds its prey makes rather than echolocation to pinpoint them. At least two gleaning bat species are known to regularly hunt highly venomous scorpions, landing on or near the ground to capture them. Mouse-eared bats in Europe use a similar strategy, gleaning most of their prey directly off the soil surface while in flight, though they switch to catching insects in the air when those are more available.
For these species, being on the ground is a brief, high-risk event rather than a sustained mode of travel. Dense vegetation makes the strategy harder. When bats hunt in cluttered environments, they detect ground prey but often hesitate or fail to capture them because they land with wings spread to increase their catching surface, and thick plant growth prevents them from reaching the ground cleanly. This means habitat structure directly shapes which bats can forage on the ground effectively and which are limited to more open areas.
Echolocation Changes When Bats Go Low
Bats that regularly hunt near the ground face a perceptual problem. Echolocation works beautifully for catching insects in open air, but close to a surface, the echoes bouncing off the ground create a wall of acoustic clutter that can drown out the faint echo returning from a small insect. Many gleaning bats deal with this by essentially turning their sonar down or off during the final approach.
Long-eared bats, for instance, emit shorter, quieter, and broader-frequency calls when gleaning compared to when they’re catching insects in open air. In lab studies, these bats stopped echolocating entirely about 200 milliseconds before striking at ground prey, and the rapid-fire “feeding buzz” that normally accompanies an aerial capture never appeared during gleaning attacks. Calls were detected in only about two-thirds of gleaning sequences overall. The bats switch to relying on the rustling sounds of the prey itself for that final targeting.
This sensory flexibility is one reason gleaning bats can exploit a food source that purely aerial hunters can’t reach. But it also means they’re operating partly blind during the most dangerous moment of the hunt, when they’re closest to the ground and most vulnerable to their own predators.
Why Grounded Bats Are Vulnerable
A bat on the ground is in trouble, regardless of species. Even vampire bats and short-tailed bats are far less maneuverable on a surface than in the air, and for species that can barely walk at all, being grounded is an emergency. This vulnerability has real consequences for both bats and people.
Domestic cats are the most significant predator that exploits grounded or low-flying bats. Data from a rabies surveillance program found that free-roaming cats had a tenfold higher interaction rate with bats compared to indoor cats, and double the probability of encountering a rabies-positive bat. In some cases, cats brought live rabies-positive bats into homes, creating direct exposure risk for the humans inside. This dynamic makes free-roaming cats an underappreciated link in the chain of rabies transmission from wildlife to people.
For the bats themselves, being grounded often means they’re already sick, injured, or exhausted. A healthy bat that lands on the ground can usually jump-launch back into the air within seconds. One that stays on the ground long enough for a person or a cat to approach is likely in distress. Wildlife agencies consistently advise against handling grounded bats with bare hands for exactly this reason: the bat may be rabid, and a bite from a panicked, sick bat can be difficult to feel through the skin.
The Evolutionary Puzzle of Bat Locomotion
There’s an ongoing debate about how the ancestors of modern bats moved before flight evolved. One school of thought holds that the earliest proto-bats were agile climbers and leapers in forest canopies, and that flight evolved from increasingly long glides between trees. Under this model, ground locomotion was never a major part of the ancestral bat’s repertoire, and the clumsiness of modern bats on the ground simply reflects the fact that the ancestor wasn’t a ground animal either.
A competing view, supported partly by the New Zealand short-tailed bat’s anatomy, suggests that at least some early bat lineages were more terrestrial than we’d expect. The shared skeletal features between Mystacina tuberculata and its 20-million-year-old Australian fossil relative Icarops aenae point to terrestrial habits deep in the family tree, not a recent adaptation. If ground-walking anatomy was present in bats that lived long before New Zealand’s unique predator-free environment existed, it’s harder to argue that terrestrial locomotion in bats is always a secondary novelty.
The truth likely varies by lineage. Vampire bats evolved their running gait independently and relatively recently, driven by the demands of blood-feeding. The New Zealand short-tailed bat may have inherited its walking ability from a much older ancestor. Most other bats never needed to walk well, and so they never did. Flight is so overwhelmingly effective for a bat’s survival that ground locomotion was simply not worth investing in for the vast majority of the order’s more than 1,400 living species.
What Happens When You Find a Bat on the Ground
If you encounter a bat sitting on the ground during daylight hours, the safest assumption is that something is wrong with it. Healthy bats roost in dark, sheltered spots during the day and are active at night. A bat on a sidewalk or lawn is likely injured, sick, dehydrated, or a juvenile that fell from a roost. Never pick it up with bare hands. Use thick leather gloves or a towel to gently scoop it into a container, and contact a local wildlife rehabilitator.
If the bat is on the ground at night and appears alert, it may simply be resting between foraging bouts or may have landed to grab prey. Some species, particularly larger fruit bats, will occasionally land on the ground to eat fallen fruit. In these cases, the bat will usually take off on its own within a few minutes if left undisturbed. The wing-powered jump that bats use for takeoff works on almost any surface, so a healthy bat on flat ground isn’t necessarily trapped. It’s when the bat stays put, looking sluggish or disoriented, that intervention becomes appropriate.
Young bats are a special case. Pups that fall from a maternity roost before they can fly are grounded and helpless, but the mother may return for them. If you find a tiny bat with sparse fur and closed eyes, placing it in a warm, quiet spot near where it was found (off the ground, on a wall or tree trunk where the mother can locate it by its calls) gives the best chance of reunion. If the mother doesn’t return within several hours, a rehabilitator is the next step.