Pipistrellus pipistrellus

Sachanowicz, Konrad, Ciechanowski, Mateusz, Rachwald, Alek & Piskorski, Michał, 2015, Overview of bat species reported in Albania with the first country records for eight species, Journal of Natural History 50, pp. 513-521 : 519

Pipistrellus pipistrellus

Gomsiqe e Epërme (location same as above), 6 August 2003, 1 non-lactating ♀ ad. netted over a river in a rocky gorge. Syri i Kalter I (39°55.440 ʹ N, 20°11.564 ʹ E, 175 m a.s.l.), 23 April 2004, time-expanded echolocation calls of commuting individuals recorded over a karstic spring surrounded by a riparian woodland with oriental plane. The frequency of maximum energy was 43.2–44.5 (mean 44.2, n = 7), and the probability of correct species identification by iBatsID software was 0.93–0.99 (mean 0.97).

Due to the separation of P. pipistrellus and P. pygmaeus ( Barratt et al. 1997; Dietz et al. 2009) and the lack of any characters allowing for species identification, the only previous record ( Uhrin et al. 1996) has to be assigned to P. pipistrellus sensu lato (Sachanowicz et al. 2006).

Although scarcely known until 2003 (21 species and unidentified representatives of three species complexes), the bat fauna of Albania is presently adequately surveyed with 32 recorded species. Our research has confirmed that Albania is one of the European countries with the highest bat species richness. In the geographic Balkans, where 35 bat species are known ( Dietz and Kiefer 2014), a greater or equal number of species has only been recorded in Bulgaria with 33 species if an acoustic record of Myotis dasycneme (Boie, 1825) over the Danube river is included ( Benda et al. 2003; Mayer et al. 2007; Niermann et al. 2007) and continental Greece with 32 species ( Hanák et al. 2001; Mayer et al. 2007). For two of the rarest European bats, R. mehelyi and N. lasiopterus , but also for M. brandtii , Pl. kolombatovici and B. barbastellus , we greatly extended their known geographic ranges in the south of Europe ( Dietz et al. 2009). The previous record of M. nattereri in Albania ( Chytil and Vlašín 1994) was most probably of this species, which is the only representative of the M. nattereri complex confirmed in the Balkans so far ( Salicini et al. 2013). Of the two Balkan species not recorded in Albania, Eptesicus nilssonii is only known from single localities in Bulgaria ( Benda et al. 2003) and Croatia ( Pavlinić and Tvrtković 2003) whereas the known range of M. aurascens (sensu Mayer et al. 2007) covers only a small area of northeast Bulgaria and extends to Romania, Ukraine and Russia ( Dietz and Kiefer 2014).