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).

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!