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.

Albino Red-tailed Hawk

On October 11, 2012, I was driving my sick confuser to Elan, the Mac repair place in Columbus. Yep, it's a solid two hour drive from my Appalachian home to anyone who will so much as look at a sick Mac. I very much mind having a sick computer, but I never mind going to Columbus. It's my Bright Lights, Big City. 

I'm tooling along on I-77N through Woodsfield, Ohio when I see a kettle of circling turkey vultures. And in that kettle is a snow- white bird. I try very hard not to drive off the road. Because Woodsfield is where the leucistic turkey vulture I saw twice back in the mid-90's used to live. I pull over as fast as I can and grab my big rig. Something told me to bring it to Columbus with me, even though it didn't make sense at the time.

It made sense now.

Smaller than the vultures. By golly, that looks like a redtail!

And a redtail it was, a true albino as far as I could tell, pale beak and pale blue or perhaps even a pink eye, not a mark on it. What a sight, what a heart-soaring, breath stopping sight it was.

I stood there gasping at the roadside, thankful to see it, thankful I'd brought my camera, saying a silent prayer of hosanna to whatever powers of nature, sky, and serendipity had brought this wondrous sight before me.

A sign, a sign, certainly a sign. Of what, I cannot say. Just good. Hope. Strength. Triumph of light over darkness, positivity over bitter negativity. Surely a sign of simple genetic, but not necessarily deleterious mutations. This bird has somehow survived into adulthood, fully functional, blindingly, gloriously white. Long may it fly.

I hereby apologize to all the people who've called and written me over the years to tell me about albino hummingbirds, redtails, cardinals, blue jays, expecting that I would jump in the car forthwith and come see them, too. If I have seemed a bit bored with it all, rather non-commital and unimpressed, I was not now. I was shot through with lightning, as you were upon seeing your special sign bird.

It was not my leucistic turkey vulture, the one dear Charlie Macaw spotted for me so many years ago, the same one I saw again the next summer in Woodsfield. But it was something, something searingly beautiful, transformative, a vision, a bolt from the blue.

Beautiful sky pilot, fly on. I'll be watching for you.