I'll See Myself Out

 

I’m limp with relief, giddy with joy. I’ve waited to write this post until Something Else happened. I knew something else was about to happen. I made this video the night of May 27. I’ve been so busy, stretched so thin, that I’ve released my four female bats without blogging about it. I’ve done a LOT of interesting things lately without blogging about them. The four female bats were ready for the big time the first week of May, and I was only too happy to release them, knowing that if I didn’t get them out, they might drop pups on me. Then I’d be saddled with caring for mother and baby until the pups were ready to fly…arrggh. Nope. Way beyond my expertise. The two males, for whatever reason, didn’t take to the wing like the females did, and I held them back for more flight practice. 

 When I made this video, I knew it would be Carmelo’s and my last night together. I wanted a little memento of just how special he is. He’s so perfect, so aware, so beautiful. And so very gentle. Of all six bats I had this winter, Carmelo was the gentlest. He never so much as cussed at me. I can’t say the same for Lustofin, Laura, Poppy, or Fuchsia. Even my little darling Jolie Blonde turned cussy as spring neared. Who could blame her? She was likely pregnant, and pregnant people don’t willingly put up with fools.

 And I am a fool. I’ve got this nice hi-tech tent, and I decided that Carmelo and Lustofin, who were lagging far behind the females, would fly better and faster if I just set them free in it and let them fly around unsupervised each night. It was great, and it worked for Carmelo. Within just a few nights, Carmelo got sharper and sharper, and he flew better each night I came in to exercise them. Lustofin isn’t flying well, and that’s another story—he’s not ready yet. He’s on two antibiotics now, and is about to go on an antiparasitic. More on that later… But Carmelo! You can see and hear the beauty of his flight in this video. I watched him do four rounds of the tent, with an expert about-face in mid-air, and a perfect drop into his little hamper, and I knew he was ready. Ready to go home. Ready to go free. Tomorrow night, May 28, my mom’s 103rd birth anniversary, Carmelo would be released at last! I’d been caring for him since New Year’s Eve, when he was found hanging in a doorway inside Monkey’s Uncle Tattoo Parlor in Harmar Village, Marietta. 

 I came out this morning, May 28, to check and see where Carmelo and Lustofin spent the night. They’ve always willingly returned to their hamper, to sleep in the folded fleece curtains hanging there. Just like in the video--it was so cute!  I lifted the fleece, and there was Lustofin. But where was Carmelo? For the next two hours, I searched that tent, high and low. I came back with a broom and dustpan. Took everything out of it, unfurled every single piece of nylon and window covering; turned my little camp table over, turned the chair over, looked in every pocket and cranny. NOTHING. Carmelo had left the building. But HOW? It was zipped up tight; I always neurotically checked the zippers twice when I left them in the evening after feeding. I found the hole. It was a little port made to admit an extension cord. An inch across, plenty for a clever bat. How he found it I have no idea--the nylon all around it is slick and I'd never seen either bat try to crawl on it or cling to it. But it's the only hole in the tent.

And that clever little bat had found the ONE portal in the entire 14 x 10’ tent, and seen himself out. And out was into my four-car garage, which was closed up tight for the night. Ohh boy. I knew the chances of finding a 3” long brown bat in that enormous garage were slim to none. I told myself that if he could find a 1” portal in a big nylon tent, he could certainly find a hole in a four-car garage to let himself out. But. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was still in the garage, having fallen into a box, an old stovepipe baffle, a slick-sided flowerpot. Maybe he was trapped somewhere. Arrrgh. My mind went all kinds of places. I tried to keep it from going to pieces. I kept reminding myself what a clever bat my Carmelo was. 

And I resolved to go out to the garage at the Witching Hour of 9:15, when it’s finally dark, to see if he was flying around in there. I kept myself busy all day long, potting and moving plants, planting the tomatoes, emptying the greenhouse, watering, watering, watering. I can’t believe how many plants I have to deal with, but I got them all out of the plastic hut. Just in time too…it’s stifling hot in there now! I laid my two Creole Lady hibiscii on their sidse, and sprayed the bejesus out of them, washing away a living crawling felt of green aphids. I repotted the big one, marveling that she’s only two years old and taller than I am. 

 I fed a batch of orphaned baby birds every hour on the hour (another story there, too). Finally it was dusk, finally I could go out to the garage. I opened the small garage door and the first thing I heard was the flicker of leathern wings. CARMELO!! He circled and did figure eights in the light of my headlamp. He dove down and circled twice around my head! Then he flew up high into the rafters and tucked himself behind a beam. Just to be granted this sight of him flying like a star pilot; to know he was alive and well and ready to go; to be able to say hello again and goodbye, was such an enormous gift. I was overwhelmed with joy. I hurried over and opened the garage door on one end, then opened the two garage doors on the other end of the building. I flung the people door wide. I grabbed a chair and sat for almost an hour, listening, hoping to hear him fly down and out. I couldn’t hear anything. Perhaps he was resting. Perhaps he’d flown out as the doors were grinding open. I would never know. No matter.

 I didn’t need to see him go. Any bat who could find a 1” flap-covered cord hole halfway up the side of a slick nylon tent could find three huge garage door openings. Carmelo would be free tonight, free to course the meadows for moths, to dart through the blinking lightning bugs. To fly back to Marietta, if he wanted, to the brick streets he came from. He could do whatever he wanted, and this was the perfect moment I’d been working for since December 31. I was so glad that moment was granted to me. As for Carmelo, he knew when he was ready, and he made it easy for me. Sort of, if you don't count a few hours searching and maybe 10 hours worrying and that perfect hour sitting in the dark garage with the moonlight coming in and the crickets tuning up, and the lightning bugs playing all around in the soft almost-summer air.

Feeding the Wild Bat

Drusilla's been in the warm house for three nights now. It warmed up to the 60's on Jan. 10-13, and I took that opportunity to bring her in and feed her up, reasoning that she might have stirred in her hibernaculum and, if she were lucky, maybe even caught a few moths. For all I know, bats sleep all the way through the winter, but I don't want to take the chance of starving this little creature. She's been sleeping for a month. That seems long enough. Time for some food!



Bats amaze me at every turn. I find it incredible that you can take a hibernating bat, wake her up, and feed her just a few hours later. You can feed her and then put her back out in the garage and she'll cool down and sleep for another month. That's just cool.

My cinematographer is really jumpy tonight. She's standing on a chair and making comments, and she's very cute up there. She kinda freaks out at the end. I can't blame her.

I figured I would temper Drusilla's nastiness with another dose of dog. Bonus Chet Baker boudoir footage at the end.

Drusilla Awake!

We're back with Zick and Drusilla, and the little bat is fully awake now. She's been warming up for about 5 hours and is ready to eat. It all goes pretty smoothly for awhile. Dru tends to eat well, but she gets more and more wound up the more she eats. By about the eighth mealworm she's out for blood. I dunno. Maybe she's one of Them. I'll have to check to see if she sparkles in sunlight.

This video is noteworthy on several counts, not least because we have captured Chet Baker wagging his tail. This is something that doesn't happen often or well, thanks to the fact that his tail is all bent out of shape (called a screw tail, and natural to the breed) and doubly so since I fell down the stairs while carrying him under my arm on Columbus Day. It wagged better before that. Hey, so did I.

We're all better now. If he lost some waggability, he didn't have that much to lose. 

Chet has been corresponding recently with a Bugg (Boston Terrier x Pug) named Bugsy. Apparently, one of the reasons to cross these two fine breeds is to get something that resembles a Boston terrier, but has a tail. Here's Bugsy's:

Bugsy's person, Miss Kim, has been quite free over the years with the DONATE button on the right sidebar of the blog. Chet wrote her a thank-you letter recently, prompting a response from Bugsy, a spirited correspondence between the two dogs, and these photos followed. I have to say that Bugsy is just about the cutest thing I've ever seen, and if this is what you get when you cross a pug with a Boston terrier, well, cross away.

I offer these photos in thanks to the generosity of Miss Kim, and as an apt antidote to Drusilla's pure evil.

Bugsy. You adorable thing you. The Un-Drusilla.

Torpid Bat

Oh, would that Drusilla the Big Brown Bat pup were this tractable all the time. If you're just tuning in to the special lunacy that goes on in my house every day, Drusilla was found on Halloween, clinging to a curtain high within the Riverside Artists' Coop Gallery in Marietta, Ohio. It was already darned cold and Drusilla wouldn't have done well simply released outdoors. To be exact, she probably would have died. So I took her in and waited for the next nice long spell of warm nights (above 60 degrees) when I'd be able to release her. And they never came. It stayed cold until it was far too late to even try releasing her downtown. 

Despite my hunch that she's just a babe from the past summer, Drusilla was never a sweet young thing. No, she's a narrrrsty bat. The ideal subject for cold storage, in my opinion. So she's my guinea pig and I must say, 2.5 months into this grand little experiment, that she's working out splendidly. Her first cold storage spell was a week, after which I took her out, weighed, fed, and watered her for several days, then put her back.

Then I left her out there for two weeks. She was fine. 

The last period of cold storage was a full month. No food or water for a month. Try that with your kitty cat. And here's how she is:

What she is, is torpid. She's too cold to do much other than look threatening. So she spreads her wings, squeals in a creepy Venusian way and bares her teeth and that's about it. When she warms up, though, whoa Nelly bar the door. Flat-out dangerous. It only takes a few hours for her to warm up to the point of eating, and two days later she's ready to rock. I'm hoping, for historical purposes, to get a video of her at her worst but I fear for the safety of my videographer Phoebe it will have to be shot through the sliding glass door of the aviary. I would like to show it to anyone who thinks you can pick up a bat with bare hands. And to anyone who's tempted to think that I keep bats for fun. No. I keep them so they don't have to die. If I could find an accessible big brown bat hibernaculum, I'd hang them up with their buddies and walk away. So fast.

Many thanks to my unwilling videographer, Phoebe Linnea, who is much, much less than thrilled to be in the aviary with me and Dru. And to Chet Baker, who insists on being present just to make sure I don't fall in love with another durned bat. 

No danger there, Chet Baker. I love Drusilla (for better or much, much worse) but she will never replace YOU.

photo by Sara Stratton

see her beautiful piece about this July visit to our sanctuary here.

Chet Baker Meets Drusilla the Bat

This video was made November 3, when I'd just gotten Drusilla and thought she might turn into a nice bat, given gentle handling and time. 

Wrong. Drusilla is not a nice bat, as you'll see in the rather funny end of this bad, blurry video. Her true nature comes out. I can't blame her. She doesn't want to be around me. She wants to be hanging up with other bats. But still. She is a pill among pills.

And what also comes out is the true nature of Chet Baker, Boston Terrier, the gentlest, smartest, wisest little doggeh ever to walk the earth. Watch how he manages his feelings upon finding out that Mether has a new love. Restraint, thou art named Chet.

Do not worry, Chet Baker. I'm a long way from loving Drusilla the way I love you. Never gonna happen. Spring will come and we'll turn her loose and I'll be all yours again. Until the next time the phone rings with a baby bird on the other end of the line.

A New Bat: Meet Drusilla

There's a new bat in town. 

I think she's this year's pup. She's the smallest big brown bat I've ever seen. 

She was found on Halloween, hanging on a curtain high up inside the Marietta (OH) Riverside Artist's Cooperative gallery by a member named Todd. 

Todd picked her up in a washcloth and brought her home in a coffee can. He tried to feed her but she wasn't interested. He posted about her on Facebook and a bunch of people jumped on him and told him to get in touch with me. I made sure Todd knew that you have to wear gloves when handling a bat. Not just washcloths. I wanted to get that bat away from him. In retrospect, I'm glad I did.

So I drove into town and picked her up. From the start she was different. First, she was tiny, and I was sure she was this year's baby. Second, she never stopped cussing while being handled. 

She even cussed the whole time she ate. And third, she bit. She bit my glove. A lot. And now, as of late November as I'm writing this, she's biting even more, and she's decidedly un-fun to handle. She's about got me bamboozled. She's a real pill. But she doesn't self-feed, so she needs to be handled just long enough to be fed a few worms, then put away again.

So I named her Drusilla, which matches her witchy personality well. And I decided that she would spend as much of her winter as possible in the cold garage, hibernating between towels in a covered tank.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to let her go. But since Halloween there has not been a single night above 50 degrees, and bats can't summon the energy to fly until it's consistently 55 and above at night. So releasing a young bat on a cold night when it couldn't fly to find a suitable roost would be contraindicated.

Chewing on a worm. Drusilla weighs 17.5 gm, which is on the light side, and I mean to keep her lean and, I guess, mean.  She hung nicely in the cold garage for two straight weeks when we went to Texas, not eating. Then ate well for a day or two when we came home. She's hanging up now for a spell, until the next warmish night when I see moths flying. I'll take her out, feed and water and weigh her, and hang her out again. It's as close to nature as I can get. I don't intend to let her get fat like Stella and Mirabel did. Bless their sweet little hearts. 

Next: A Drusilla video, featuring the ever-gentlemanly Chet Baker.