Dining with Bats

I have a nice bit of video here for you. This is Stella, who's had a nice evening of flight training and is getting her reward of a baker's dozen of mealworms. As the video opens, you'll hear a field cricket chirping, but if you turn your volume up, you'll also hear a low-pitched thrumming which is Stella echolocating her way to the mealworm dish. So turn it up and hit Play and listen hard as the video opens!

When she's had enough, I move her out of the dish (she'd happily eat 30 mealworms at a sitting) so Mirabel can have some, too. Mirabel was always the less enthusiastic flyer and eater, so she dropped her weight more slowly than did Stella. But I got them both down to 20 gm. and once the weight was off you could see that flying became a real joy to them. Next video: The Flying Battista Sisters!

The Bats Take Wing!

May 7 was a turning point for the batgirls. I had noticed that Stella was flying ever so much better since being delivered, as I'm sure I would. It was a wonderfully warm day, and a warm evening. Bill and I had been out all day doing a Washington County (Ohio) Big Day, seeing as many birds as we could, trying to break our record of 109. I think we got 105. I peeled out early to do some stuff and came home, and everyone else kept birding. They came back after dark to celebrate a record broken. I asked them if they'd like to see the bats fly, and Shila and Steve and Marcy stepped into the garage.

 Stella

The girls were hawt. They were flying when I walked into the garage!  I got the sneaky feeling that they were only just getting warmed up for the spring. They flew, they gained altitude, they stuck their landings, and it was so sweet to have Shila and the Whipple Bird Club there to witness it. Shila especially, since she'd seen me work them when they could barely flutter to the floor. "Wow!" she said. "They're flying SO much better!" I knew what she meant. They were better, but they weren't ready for prime time. Not yet.

Still, it was wonderful to see how spunky they were. Maybe I hadn't messed them up after all. 

The kids smiled to see them flit around my head. I'm the only one who gets to handle the animals or go in the bat tent, as I'm the only one vaccinated against rabies. Truthfully, I had stopped worrying about rabies pretty early on. I had been vaccinated in 2010 and these bats had been in quarantine since the first week of February. They were perfectly healthy, if temporarily obese, and showing no symptoms of any disease. Still, no one in my family would come near them; they viewed them through the tent’s nylon walls. That was as it should be, for rabies is nothing to be trifled with, even if the risk of contracting it is vanishingly small.

That didn't mean I handled them bare handed. In the three months I kept them, the bats only bit twice, and since I always wore sturdy gardening gloves, no damage was done. Stella would gnaw a little at the gloved hand she rested on when, on the rare occasions that I hand fed her, I wasn’t dishing up the mealworms fast enough. Once when I went to get her out of her roost she chattered angrily and bit down hard on the thumb of my glove, which I’d thoughtlessly stuck right in her face. I felt the power of her jaws squeezing my thumb and thanked goodness I had always worn gloves when handling them. Figures that the impetuous blonde would be the nipper. Still, she was anything but aggressive--just protecting herself.

What an incredible privilege it was to be able to handle them, to see how their delicate finger bones ran through the cool smooth membranes of their wings, to see how their legs and wings and tail were all connected by crenulated skin that, when unfolded, would help bear them aloft. 

All in good time, my pretties.

ZICK ALERT:  Come see me and Bill and get your copy of The Bluebird Effect and Bill's brand-new The Young Birder's Guide to North America signed and personalized at Sugden Bookstore, 282 Front Street, Marietta, Ohio, Friday, June 8, from 4-9 pm as part of our beautiful town's fabulous Merchants and Artists Walk on summer Fridays. Free ice cream (and extraneous minutiae).

Flight-training Bats

This is what a torpid bat (i.e. one who's been roosting at under 55 degrees) does when you pick it up. Unable to make a quick escape with her cold muscles and slow metabolism, she'll spread her wings and gape like an addled opossum, looking as big and fearsome as she can. Not many people want to mess with a bat who's doing that.  I am one exception.

I've been blogging since December 2005, which seems an eternity ago, and I've only just gotten moderately conversant with video. As in, I can point the camera, remember to shut my gob while it's rolling, and now I am beginning to have the faintest germ of knowledge of what to do with that video when I've got it uploaded to my Mac. Thank goodness for iMovie. However, I'm not home free, even when I've got it edited and put together. I still can't upload them to YouTube from home. Our $90/month Hughes.Net Internet connection is too slow, too fraught with interruptions, to allow that. Ah, rural life. So I have to dump the files on a flash drive and send them into work with Bill, and he uploads them to YouTube from there. Then  when they're done he emails me their YouTube URL and then, and only then, may I upload them to my blog. Needless to say, the disincentive to put videos on my blog is large.

 Floridacracker, who posts fabulous vids on his PureFlorida blog, is a great inspiration to me. I don't know how he does all he does, but I wanna be him when I grow up. So this post kicks off a little series of videos of the Battista Sisters, mostly as a way to show you how neat they are in motion, how fun they are to work with, how endearing their little smacky worm-smeared chops, razor-sharp teeth and pointed pink tongues can be.

Precious! once you get used to it. She's just trying to look scary since she can't wriggle, being too cold. Fabulous dentition, a classic insectivore with a point on every tooth.

This video was made a few days before the girls were ready for release. As you can see, Stella lands on the ground a couple of times, once even on my wrist like a tiny furry leatherwinged falcon. Bats who are ready for release really shouldn't land on the ground, but if they do, they should be able to take right off and gain altitude. Stella does this and I'm thrilled.

I'm posting this to show how I work the bats to get them flying. I  gently annoy them just enough to get them to take off several times in rapid succession. It took them a little while to get the "hang" of landing on the nylon mesh tent walls, but once they did they'd stick there like a tossed burr.

Enjoy the video, hard won though it may be. Bat rehabilitators: this bat is close to releasable, but not quite ready for prime-time. Too many ground ditchings. That'll improve.

ZICK ALERT:  Come see me and Bill and get your copy of The Bluebird Effect and Bill's brand-new The Young Birder's Guide to North America signed and personalized at Sugden Bookstore, 282 Front Street, Marietta, Ohio, Friday, June 8, from 4-9 pm as part of our beautiful town's fabulous Merchants and Artists Walk on summer Fridays. Free ice cream (and extraneous minutiae).

The Batgirls' Race Against Time

The walls of time kept closing in. I had speaking engagements on May 9, then another at Presque Isle Festival of the Birds near Erie, Pennsylvania on May 11-13. One day home on the 14^th, and on the evening of the 15^th we were headed for a full week in Alaska. What to do with the bats? Because I was hardly to be home for the next two weeks, I’d been planning to take them up to Columbus to the Ohio Wildlife Center for safekeeping on May 9, and pick them up on our way back from Alaska on May 21. But something in me stopped dead at the thought. Stella had already aborted her baby. What if Mirabel delivered in that span, which was squarely in the time when big brown bats give birth? What if the bats stopped eating and slid backward, traumatized by the upheaval? What if they were handled by someone who didn’t appreciate just how sensitive they were? What if they could actually be ready for release before I had to leave? The morning of May 9 came, and I made a snap decision not to take them to Columbus, but to leave them in their tent, and see how they were doing when I landed briefly at home on the 13^th.  Maybe four more days would do it. I was listening hard to my little voice, hoping it was right.

When I came home on the 10^th, it was cold, dipping into the 40’s, and I knew they’d be unable to fly. I weighed them. Good—right around 19 gm. each. Keep eating, keep losing weight, batgirls. I had faith that they’d be OK.

I forged on to the festival in Presque Isle, PA, giving it my all for the weekend. When I got back on May 13, it’d be do or die—release them, or leave them for another risky week in the tent, with Phoebe, who was staying home to finish out her last week of school, sneaking in during the day to replenish their mealworms and water. I didn’t like the idea at all. Wearily, I unpacked the car, lugged my suitcase into the bedroom and left most of it untouched as I began to repack for a week in Alaska starting the 15^th. I’d have tonight and tomorrow home, and then I’d take off again. I wasn't happy about that. I felt my life had gotten away from me, and I didn't want the bats to suffer for it.

A bat illusion. Mirabel's on the tent wall; Liam's outside!

I looked up from my work with a start, glancing at the clock. It was 9:10 pm and my girls would be out of the roost and looking for their evening meal. Rats! I ran out to the garage through a misty rain, the crickets, frogs and toads singing all around in the cool night air. I flipped the switch and the garage fluorescents buzzed to life. And both bats were hanging high in the flight tent, and both instantly took flight. I couldn’t tell luggy Mirabel from agile Stella. Both circled the tent one, two, three, five, eight times, flew as I’d never seen them fly. I stood transfixed, laughing with delight. Stepped into the tent. They dove at my head, like bats are supposed to do, swooped low and threatened to tangle themselves in my hair. Go ahead! I’d love that! Twice, Mirabel landed on my back and I laughed aloud. Then she took off again, circling and circling.

I zipped myself back out of the tent and ran to the house. “FAMILY MEETING IN THE GARAGE!!” I ran up and downstairs, gathering Bill and Phoebe and Liam. They filed out. “THIS IS BIG!! “I chortled. “Did Mirabel have her baby?” Phoebe asked. “No no no, much better!” The bats were hanging up again, looking around quietly with swiveling ears. I stepped into the tent and extended my arm like a circus ringmaster. “Presenting the Flying Battista Sisters!” The bats clung resolutely. I tickled their tail membranes and finally Mirabel and then Stella launched back into the air. Once again they circled, dipping and diving. Mirabel landed on the ground, then sprang back up, rising to the top of the tent. On the last possible day they could have chosen, the bats were ready to go. Oh, hallelujah!

Here's the fatroll of a 25 gm. bat.

Compare with the slender Stella below. 

I gave them a big bowl of mealworms. They’d earned it. The next afternoon, in between packing for Alaska and doing the ten thousand things a mother has to do to leave her human kids in the care of someone else, I wrote a note for the babysitter, watered all the plants, then tenderly gathered up their blue roosting towel with them inside and drove the Battista sisters  into Marietta for release. They’d come from town and back to town they’d go. You don’t release town bats in the country. They’d need to find a nice old house with a snug hot attic for their maternity roost.

This photo is from Stella's last day with me. She was flying so fast and so frequently it was all I could do to get a photo of her. Mirabel, only slightly less zippy. Both making five to ten circuits of the tent at one go. Both aloft for 20 minutes continuously. It was like a miracle, one I didn't want to question.  

A Tiny Tragedy

 Stella, looking round...

My spring obligations began to close in, and I was trying to see into the future and predict when the batgirls might be ready for release. I understood from Rob Mies and Lisa Fosco that bats should be able to fly continuously for ten minutes in an enclosed space to be considered releasable. I watched my girls flutter languidly from one perch to the next and wondered if they’d ever get there. But they still had weight to lose, so I worked them and kept their rations slim (12 mealworms each day) and kept hope alive. What I didn’t want to do was to have to send them to the Ohio Wildlife Center for safekeeping while we were in Alaska from May 14-21. I desperately wanted to release them before I left. I knew from past experience that the stress of transport and of being in a new environment, which would likely be much less bat-friendly than our quiet garage with its spacious flight tent, might throw them off their feed and cause them to go back into torpor. These bats knew me and were comfortable with being handled by me. Heck, sometimes I had a hard time getting them to fly--they liked hanging out on my gloved hand. I liked it, too. But oh, I wanted them to go free.

The other wall facing me was the possibility that one or both of these girls was pregnant. Big brown bats  mate in the fall and delay implantation of the fertilized egg until conditions are right. They deliver their young—one or sometimes twins—from mid-May through June in Ohio. What I did not want was more bats to worry about. 

Lisa Fosco learned that through hard experience, when bats would deliver babies while still in captivity. She said she released a female bat with a young baby clinging to her only to see the baby fall to the ground, its newly released mother vanishing into the sky.  Ack ack ack. The only alternative to prevent such a boondoggle, she said, is to keep the mother and baby together in confinement until the baby is flying and completely independent. My mind boggled at the prospect. How many more months would that be? How could I provide adequate nutrition for a lactating mother bat, and how could the baby bat learn to forage in a flight tent? No, no, no, no. These bats had to go and find a maternity roost before they delivered their young. I felt like Indiana Jones in the vault with all four walls closing in. 

On the evening of May 1 I went out to fly the girls and found a small red wad on the towel beneath the bats’ roost. I knew what it had to be before I picked it up. It wasn’t a wad, it was a being: a fetus, about half developed, its tiny wings wrapped around it, each minuscule toe perfectly formed, its face dished like that of a puppy, its eyes just dark spots between the clear fetal skin. 

 

I turned it over and over, unfolded its wings and worked its tiny feet. It would have been a boy. I studied the quiet bats. Stella hung alone in the corner, not cuddled up to Mirabel as usual. Gently I picked her up and found the birth blood on her.  I fed her all the mealworms she wanted and gave her a dropper of water, apologizing to her for failing to get her out to a maternity roost where she could deliver in safety. I didn’t fly her for the next two days. By the next morning she’d passed the afterbirth. 

Looking at her baby's perfect spine reminded me of the early sonograms of our kids, just notions in the womb, but already adorned with a string of vertebral pearls. 

Oh, so very sad to know this one would never fly.

There was a bright spot in the sadness. Both bats, by May 2, were down to 20 gm, which was finally in the normal range. Yet they were still not showing sustained flight. My hands were tied. I felt the pressure of time once again. My heart ached to see the girls fly free.

Most of all, I ached for Stella and her lost baby. I wept for him and for her. I hoped that I could do better by Mirabel, hoped that part of her stubborn weight was a little fetus hanging in there, waiting for her to find the right old attic in Marietta where it could come into the world as nature intended.

I knew we were on the road to release, knew all these bats needed was a little more time. And time was the one thing I didn't have.

Bat Boot Camp

At the beginning of their training, I had to pick each bat up as if it were a box turtle--from above. If I let the bat climb onto and cling to my glove, I'd never get it in the air--they stuck to me like Velcro. I'd pick a bat up like you'd pick up a biscuit, swing it a couple of times, then gently toss it into the air. It would catch itself with its wings, flutter to the nearest tent wall, and cling. Well, it was better than not flying at all.

Stella, large and in charge.

 What I didn't know at first is that bats need to be warm--really warm--to be able to fly. They need to be slim enough to fly, but they also have to be warm. Every once in awhile I'd feel a wing or tail against my bare skin and be shocked at how cold those membranes were. Mid-April is still pretty darn cold, with nights barely edging into the 50's. And bats like to fly when nights are in the 60's and warmer. So as I think back on it, I may have been pushing these animals to fly in mid-April when they were physiologically incapable. It was probably not just that they were too fat. They were too cold to fly.

As I thought about it more, and conferred with Rob Mies and Lisa Fosco, it hit me that bats who have been hibernating all winter basically wake up and, without any conditioning at all, take to the wing. They fly out and catch a meal of moths. They aren't fat at that point--they're running very lean after a long winter. But by some miracle their muscles don't atrophy and they're good to go on their first flight. If I laid up for  six months, I wouldn't be able to hobble, much less catch a moth in flight. 

So maybe I was asking too much. I laid back a bit on the flight conditioning. We still worked out each evening if it was 55 or above, but not as hard. I noticed that they flew MUCH better when the day had been warm and the garage had heated up. Once again, the bats told me what to do and what not to do.

I kept them at 12-15 mealworms each per day, and they lost weight nicely, slowly but surely. 

I wish someone would keep me to 12 mealworms per day. Or the equivalent.

In the Bat Tent

I've left you with the post "Fat Bats" for a week now. I've been busy doing all the things that don't get done when you're running around Alaska looking at moose and orcas. Spent much of the last two days washing orchids. I find I have to wash them a couple of times a year, scrub out all their humidity trays and most of all comb each one over for that nasty white Boisduval scale and regular scale. It does wonders for them, washing orchids. Take a look at yours. Are their leaves caked with dust? Well,take 'em in the shower and give those plants a good hard rinse with tepid water. They'll thank you for it.

Bats. When we last saw Mirabel and Stella, they were topping 25 gm. and unable to fly worth a nickel, certainly unable to catch their own food on the wing. In early April, I ordered the Zephyr Screen Gazebo by Wenzel. It’s made of super-soft polyester mesh and silky nylon fabric, and I didn’t see any way they could hurt themselves on that. Most importantly, it was fitted with tight-closing zippers and a welded nylon floor integral to the tent, which is designed to keep bugs off your picnic table, but also to thwart my hairy little Houdinis. A bat can get out of a ½” crack, and it will find that crack before you know it. They needed to be completely enclosed.

Zephyr is a good name for this tent because the slightest breeze will crumple it up and roll it across your yard. The steel poles are about the thickness of a good asparagus spear. Please. Sooo flimsy.  I don't recommend it for outdoor use at all; I can't imagine where you could put this up and not have it destroyed within a week by a good gust of wind. So I ditched my plans to erect the tent in the yard, and decided to set it up in our detached garage. Our cars could live outside for a month. This decision turned out to be a bit of genius. I didn't have to worry about inclement weather or raccoons, although I did say a frequent prayer that the black rat snakes in our garage wouldn't figure out how to open the zippers. Needless to say I was completely OCD about keeping all the zippers closed. What I did not want was to feed my miracle girls to the snakes.

I released the batgirls into their spacious tent on April 14, and was disappointed to find them uninterested in using it at all. They'd flutter down to the floor and hop along. They'd never be able to use the clever bat roost I'd devised out of a stepladder and some bathmats.  Once down, they'd never fly back up there.

So I took an old crate and a towel and made a little roost on the floor of the tent, one they could literally walk to. This conditioning thing was going to be a lot more work than I thought. Egad.

I sought advice from Lisa Fosco of the Ohio Wildlife Center. She confirmed my suspicion that a 25 gm. bat is too fat to fly. And she added a warning: Sometimes, despite a rehabilitator's best efforts to condition a fat bat, it will fail to lose the weight. "And THEN what??" I asked, horrified. "Well, then it has to be taken into permanent captivity. It's happened to me twice. I worked them and worked them and they just never dropped the weight."

Lisa warned that I had to keep the bats eating; that when I cut their rations to six mealworms apiece each day, they'd try to go back into torpor, and lose no more weight. "Keep them eating, keep them active," she said.

And Mirabel stopped eating. She wouldn't eat for a week, but she still didn't lose a gram. Uh oh. I racked my brains. What to do?? How do you force-feed a bat? Finally I decided to offer her a couple of droppers of the liquid nutritional supplement Ensure, which she eagerly drank. And the next evening she started eating again. Whew! 

I watched the bats. They were so ravenous when I’d feed them, always looking for more worms. I reasoned that since I was "flying" them each evening, they could probably stand to eat more than six worms a day. I doubled their allotment. And against all expectation, that was when they began to lose weight. It seemed counterintuitive for them to drop weight when they were eating more, but it was working. I was a few days into this new protocol when Rob Mies emailed.

“Our lead keeper and I just talked and think you

should try giving them 12 mealworms each daily and see how they do in

a month or so.  We think their bodies may be shutting down fat

consumption because food has dwindled, but if they get used to 12

mealworms it should start to fall off.  Let me know how it goes.”

I felt like I did when I was raising four ruby-throated hummingbird nestlings and I started to worry that the soy-based adult maintenance formula I was feeding them was insufficient for their needs, growing so fast and making all those feathers. I decided to squeeze out the innards of mealworms like toothpaste and gave it to them on the round end of a blunt toothpick along with their nectar diet. Within hours I could literally see them pick up and begin to thrive. They all went on to fledge. A year later I learned from an experienced hummingbird rehabilitator that they probably wouldn’t have survived on maintenance formula alone—the soy protein settles out of the nectar and is indeed inadequate for a growing baby’s metabolic needs.

Once again, Instinct had stepped in and told me what to do. The bats had told me what to do.

Look at this photo. Isn't it weird? My little ectomorphic children, dwarfed by a giant bat. Eeee!