Endangered
Hildegarde's tomb bat
Taphozous hildegardeae
Hildegarde's tomb bat is a bat in the family Emballonuridae (order Chiroptera) — Taphozous hildegardeae, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The head has a long, pointed snout and a deep hollow between the eyes, that are large. There is fur over the whole body, the dorsal surface being pale greyish-brown and the ventral surface white. Fully-grown males have a black throat patch. Glands in this patch secrete fluids that tend to stain the fur on the chest yellowish-brown.
Range and habitat
This bat is endemic to East Africa where it is restricted to the coastal strip of Kenya and Tanzania. Its range extends from the Tana River estuary in Kenya to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, as well as the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar. It is dependent on caves or other underground locations for roosting, and on dry forests for feeding.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
Hildegarde's tomb bat is a diurnal species, hunting through the forests for grasshoppers, butterflies and moths, and roosting at night in caves and other underground locations, often sharing its roosts with the rather more common African sheath-tailed bat (Coleura afra). It is a diurnal species and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed its conservation status as "endangered".
In crisis
Hildegarde's tomb bat is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Hildegarde's tomb bat, Wikidata item Q1834226. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
