Fat Bats

I'm in Soldatna, Alaska now, finishing up our work at the fabulous Kenai Birding Festival with my best guy. This is a laundry morning, a repacking morning, a get-ready-for-a-big-day-morning, but I wanted to let you know what's been going on with The Battista Sisters. You remember, Mirabel and Stella, the two big brown bats we overwintered.

The Battista Sisters came to me in the first week of February 2012, having been found flying around a bedroom in an old house in Marietta, OH (Stella) and clinging to a brick pillar in a busy supermarket breezeway, six inches off the ground (Mirabel). 

I took them in, they bonded and became inseparable, and I kept them the rest of the winter, waiting for the weather to warm enough to release them. 

Oh, and I fed them. Mealworms. Boy did I feed them. 

I plan to write this up elsewhere, and spent a good long day on the jet to Soldatna writing about it, but the long and short of it is that I gave them too much food and really messed them up. They came to me in the 17-18 gm range. I left the in the garage hibernating in cool temperatures and as of March 1 they were still maintaining a weight of about 18 gm each. Perfect. But I got sloppy and started giving them more worms, just dumping a bunch in their bowl every morning, and by April 16 they were each topping 25 gm. ACK! How did that happen?

It turns out that you have to ration them to about 12 a day. I didn't know that. I gave them all they would eat, and that's a lot.

This is Mirabel, and it's what a 25-gm big brown bat looks like. She looks like a flying sofa pillow, that's what she looks like.

In this photo, I'm blowing on her back fur to reveal a huge U-shaped roll of fat around her bottom under her sweet pink skin. Oh-oh.

See how her whole stern section (the furred part) is U-shaped? It ought to be deltoid. Yeah, so should mine.
This is how a 25-gm big brown bat flies. Which is, not at all. Scuttle-hopping is more like it. Baby got bat.

Mirabel, I got some 'splainin' to do. First, I'm sorry I got you into this mess. I thought I was helping you girls.
Second, I'm going to fix it. First, we'll get you a tent. A beautiful Wenzel Zephyr 9 x 13' screen house. 
Whose most important feature is the "welded polyethelene floor" (see Mirabel's substrate, above) which is integral to the walls and will prevent you and sister Stella from escaping while you attend Bat Boot Camp with Mether.

Bat Boot Camp? What's that??

Sounds eeky (says Mirabel as she hangs inches from the floor).

Well, it's where Mether picks you up and tosses your fat little bodies into the air every evening, and she cuts your mealworm consumption by oh, 90% until you lose the extra baggage and are airborne again.

We'll install you in the tent and you can get out and fly whenever you feel like it.

Stella: We don't feel like it, thank you.

Oh, you will. You will. Or I'm going to die trying.

If you do a little math, bringing a bat down from 26 gm to 18 gm is like asking me to get down to about 97 pounds in 4 weeks. I beg of you, don't do the math.

 Some said it couldn't be done, but I owed it to my girls, and I was going to give it one heck of a try. On the bats. Not me. I would need my Tahitian Vanilla Talenti Gelato to fortify me for the work ahead.