So I was fishing on the dock in Mud. There was a group of bats flying around the end of the dock. My wife said that it was a flock of bats. It did not sound right to me. I think of birds as a flock. Bats hanging from a cave wall are called a colony for sure. The bats in Mud were flying over the water, and as we watched, they flew right through the surface of the water, swimming around only to re-emerge after a few moments. While they were flying underwater were they a school? So the question, really is what is a group of flying bats called? I won't bug the underwater thing because it looks cool.
If i refer to google, a group of bat is a colony or sometime a camp of bat. And a group of unicorn is a blessing. Always referring to google. ;p
Interesting. Feels odd to point to a black swarm of flying bats and call them a colony, whereas if they were hanging from a cave wall, colony would seem appropriate. Further down the wiki list is a gaggle of geese on ground, but a skein of geese flying. Guess I learned something fishing from the dock in Mud. There is no such thing IRL of bats swimming underwater (in a colony) so that point is moot. I would have called a bunch of flying geese a flock. Just shows what I know.
i'd always heard a cloud of bats, which makes more sense when in the air. shows on google a lot, too.
Most of the venery terms are from european medieval hunting books. Which means there is little to no consistency nor rime and reason, just like the rest of the English language, but since bats aren’t that common as a prey I’d guesstimate there wasn’t a common use for it. But the mix and match approach of a flock of geese works fine. The strangest I heard about geese was a welsh guy calling migrating geese a “goose fiver” which made no sense to me since there were a lot more than that. Turns out the expression came from the V shape they made and V=5. Sigh. Just shows the complexity of human interaction.
https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/word-lists/list-of-names-for-groups-of-animals.html the pendemonium is funny, i can see myself sitting in middle of them and each time i say a word it echo ;p
They are pretty swarmy. My friend used to live across the street from an old building with a bunch of bats living in the chimney. They would all come out around twilight each day for like 10 minutes, go crazy on some insects, and then back into the chimney. Flock kind of makes sense, too, because it's pretty easy to mistake bats for birds if you don't know any better.
I think both colony and swarm are OK. The terms that get accepted and stick, and ultimately become part of tradition, are basically the ones that sound right and has the right meaning. So, because gatherings of crows are not typically behaving like what we think of as a "flock", another term gets created to describe them. Large gatherings have been called "flocks" from time to time, but a lot of people choose other words because they decide crows are not "flock-y" for whatever reason. Groups of bats are called colonies, because they colonize caves. But historically, "swarm" has been one of the terms used to describe bats, which you can see by doing a search on Google Books. (You can also find "flock" to describe bats, but I don't like it).