BAT-FOWLING. Samuel Howitt, colored engraving originally published 1799.  Bat-fowling is an arc

BAT-FOWLING. Samuel Howitt, colored engraving originally published 1799.  Bat-fowling is an archaic form of bird trapping, (and alas, not the hunting and befouling of bats - although in 1899, Montagu Browne, a curator at Leicester Museum used a bat-fowling net to actually trap bats for study and drawing). It’s also the likely origin of the expression “beating around the bush,” as bushes would be beaten with bats in order to disturb the bird’s sleep, and then, “amazed by bright lights (of torches or small fires)” the birds would fly into the trapper’s nets. Shakespeare uses it in The Tempest, in the sense above. Sometimes however, in the same period, it was used with more innuendo. In Chapman’s A Revenge for Honor, for example a man has been: ‘a bat-fowling all night, after those birds, Those lady-birds term’d wagtails.“ And in 1811 Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue calls a bat a 'low whore, so called from moving out like bats in the dusk of the evening.” (Thanks to Gordon Williams’ very excellent Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespeare and Stuart Literature for the above lit-bits.) -- source link

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