These astonishing photographs show the scenes as eight million bats flock together in one of Africa's largest and most spectacular mammal migrations.

The 6ft-wingspan fruit bats couldn't have found a tinier corner of the continent to live on - just one acre of forest at the Kasanka National Park in Zambia.

Upon coming home after their daily hunt each tree holds up to 10 tons of bats, making this the highest density mass of warm-blooded mammals on Earth.

British photographer Will Burrard-Lucas, 29, found the bats leaving their trees as the sun went down and returning to the treetops at dawn to sleep.

He said: ‘Most people who see my pictures are amazed by the sheer numbers. Some people are freaked out by bats and as a result find these images quite disturbing.

'In some of my pictures the bats are so dense that you can barely see the sky behind them. This migration is less well known than the great wildebeest migration of the Serengeti and Masai Mara and so people are often surprised to find out about it.


‘In fact many more bats are involved in this migration than wildebeest and zebras in the great migration.’

The straw-coloured bat is a sub-species of the fruit bat population, which is found throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The plentiful fruit they eat allows them to weigh up to 11oz and live up to 30 years in the wild.

While the African wildebeest migration is often referred to as the largest mammalian migration in the world at an estimated 1.5million, it is in fact the largest where the animals migrate at ground level.
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