Here’s a beautiful tri-colored female that had been roosting in a stairwell landing on the second story of an apartment building in South Austin.  She was in the same place for about a week with no sign that she had been able to fly or feed.  Her location made her vulnerable to maintenance workers or perhaps a fearful apartment dweller with a broom.

Wildlife lovers Sonja Peterson and Thanh Vo had been checking on her and were worried that she had not seemed to move for a long time.  They were relieved to finally see her stretch her wings a few days back, but were concerned that she might be injured and unable to feed herself.  So we went to look and spotted her immediately when we pulled up to the building.  We plucked her off the wall (with gloves on) and brought her back to check her out in the flight cage.

Her wings were beautiful, no spotting, no tears, no broken bones.

Tri-colored bat at Austin Bat Refuge

We checked her out under UV light and no florescence showed up that would indicate Pd, the fungus that causes White-nose Syndrome.

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She flew right off when given the opportunity and we watched as she did about six laps around the aviary.  This is way more continuous flight than the last tri-colored we took in a few days ago.

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So this leaves us to wonder why she would roost in such an exposed location, vulnerable to any humans walking by or even grackles which could easily spot her against the white stucco.

Most of our tri-colored bats come to us from the upper levels of apartment buildings that have open-ended corridors leading to the various apartments.  We think the bats consider these to be open-ended caves and feel quite at home there.  At this time of year both sexes of tri-coloreds should be swarming at cave mouths and mating, the females storing sperm for spring births.  Is it possible this bat is misplaced and hanging around wondering where the guys are?

We’ll feed her up and then bring her back to the same area and hope she finds a real cave to get her back on track.
Check out our local species info page: https://austinbatrefuge.org/tri-colored-bat/

Sonja and Thanh are doing great work with the feral cats around their apartment.  Thanks to them this bat and all other wildlife will fare much better in their area.  Thanks for caring Sonja and Thanh!


So our tri-colored bat checks out clean under the black light, no orange fluorescence, no spotting in normal light, we think she’s clean for Pd, no White-nose Syndrome.
She’s not sustaining flight however.  She flew the length of the flight cage once but landed and has only taken short flights since then.  It is said that they are sporadic flyers with a short elliptical flight patterns, so this may be normal.  But she did not fly away when she had the opportunity as we were collecting her, so we’ll need to check her out some more to make sure she has the strength a bat needs to survive in the wild.

On the left is the recording of her call as she made that one flight down the length of the flight cage.  On the right is a call from the reference library of a tri-colored bat in Mammoth Cave State Park in Kentucky from back in 2007.  Tragically, tri-colored bats in that area have been decimated by White-nose Syndrome, numbers have plummeted 80% since it’s arrival in 2013 and that song is likely not heard very often in that area nowadays.  How sad to think of all the bats that have perished from this terrible disease.  And awful to think we’ll likely be dealing with it ourselves in a year or two.

Tri-colored bat sonogram & reference call

She weighs 8 grams!  So surprising that a tiny bat would weigh so much.  She looks about the same size as our evening bat Zonker, not way smaller as we would have expected.


This tri-colored bat was hanging in an apartment building 2nd story hallway in North Austin for the past few days.
She hadn’t left to forage and was soon to attract attention from the maintenance staff, so our good friend Ed Sones brought her in.  She showed just how quick a tri-colored bat can be when Ed was collecting her, but did not fly away, so we’ll need to check for wing damage once she gets more accustomed to us.

Almost all our tri-colored bats come from apartment building hallways on the upper levels.  They must think these open ended hallways are just another cave and perfectly suitable for them; and they would be if it weren’t for all those pesky humans!

Her orange forearms, tiny size, pointy nose, and longer ears all indicate Perimyotis subflavus, formerly Pipistrellus subflavus, commonly known as Tri-colored bat, formerly Eastern Pipistrelle.  Whew, they sure do make it complicated!
Check out her range and species info on our webpage https://austinbatrefuge.org/tri-colored-bat/

 


We had a great time last night conducting a Bat Walk to mark the third anniversary of the founding of Shoal Creek Conservancy, here in Austin.
Bat fans showed up on the second night of cool weather to see if bats would fly from under the 9th St. Bridge in Duncan Park.
Though the cool weather felt great to us after a long extended hot summer, the bats were snug in their expansion-joint crevices under the bridge and did not want to drop out into the cool night.  The temperature had dropped to 43 degrees F the previous night and that night’s dew point of 47 F promised another cool night ahead.  Since fewer insects fly below 50 F, they must have decided to conserve their energy budget and stay snug in the roost.  Here’s a thermal imaging snapshot of the crevice we inspected.

thermal image crevice 9th St. Bridge Duncan Park

Those are bat bodies showing white and their reading was about 88 deg F on the outside of their fur.  Their body heat kept the crevice nice and warm, 82.6 deg F here next to the bats in this snapshot, 15 degrees warmer than the blue-colored bridge outside the crevice.  It would take a lot of snuggling to re-create all that warmth, so perhaps they just hunkered down to wait out the cooler nights.  Low temps will be back in the 60s for the next two weeks, so I think they made the right call.

Great group of people at Shoal Creek Conservancy; we’re so happy there is a unified voice to speak up on behalf of beautiful Shoal Creek!
Thanks to all who came out to hear our talk and watch our radar images of Central Texas bat activity.  Next year we’ll unveil the new SonoBat Live and if we get a warmer night, we’ll all be able to see real time sonograms of the echolocation calls of flying bats.


Zach Dodson is an Austin-born writer/artist/illustrator
Author of Bats of the Republic, a wonderful out-of-the-box creation
Buy it – and look inside the dust cover!
Here is his blog about some books that influenced his love of bats.

PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

10 Books That Will Change Your Mind about Bats

Bats are a much-maligned animal. Long thought of as creepy or evil or diseased, a closer look reveals that the wide variety of bat species also possess an amazing array of attributes and perform all sorts of vital ecological roles: from pollinating bananas and mangoes to eating so many insects every night that they save farmers millions in pesticide. I’ve written a book that features bats. It’s called Bats of the Republic (as in the Republic of Texas). It’s set in the 1840s when Texas was its own country for those few strange years, and the main character is a naturalist who travels to Texas and becomes obsessed with documenting all the bat species there (like an Audubon for bats, really). He makes camp outside of a cave and creates many drawings of bats, featured in the book.
He’s a bat lover, and I hope the book reveals why we all should be. To that end, I’ve put together a list of other books that reveal these fascinating creatures and their essential role in the ecology of the planet and human activities. There’s never been a more important time to pay attention to bats. White Nose Syndrome is a relentless new disease that has devastated the North American bat population in recent years. White fungus appears on the faces and wings of hibernating bats, causing them to wake up in the middle of winter when food sources are scarce. The mortality rate at the caverns where the disease is discovered often approaches 100%. Over 6 million bats have died since 2006. This ecological disaster is the most precipitous decline of wildlife in a century and has wide-ranging implications for the environment, farming, and biodiversity.There are many ways you can help, but a first great step is learning more. Here are some excellent bat books to begin with.

“In Praise of Bats” essay in the book The Moon by Whale Light by Diane Ackerman

This is a great place to start. Ackerman, a lyrical and fluid writer, makes a literary introduction to bats. Her guide into their hidden world is none other than Merlin Tuttle, bat photographer and conservationist, who founded Bat Conservation International. His namesake applies: the man was a bat wizard and did much to champion their cause and work to change people’s negative perception of these fascinating creatures. They visit Bracken Cave, near San Antonio, Texas, the largest colony of bats (and actually the largest concentration of mammals) on the planet. I went when I was doing research for the book, to watch their nightly emergence in the summer. It was beautiful: for over four hours, the bats streamed from the mouth of the cave. It sounded like a waterfall. Ackerman helps set the record straight: how damaging myths about Dracula and rabies have been to bats, and how important they are to us ecologically. A perfect meditation to enter the kingdom of Chiroptera.

Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Bill Schutt

This book takes as its subject every creature that lives off of blood as a primary source of food. So: leaches, bed bugs, ticks, and, of course, vampire bats. There are only three species of vampire bats (out of over 1,200 species of bats total — one of the most diverse animal families on the planet), and their reputation is outsized. One of the species feeds exclusively on chickens. Schutt gets into some pretty grisly stuff: a digestion system that processes blood as food is a different thing, and vampire bats indeed have sneaky ways of stalking their prey. But they are, above all, fascinating. And really not creepy at all next to the chapters on the other blood-suckers. Those are creatures to be afraid of.

Stellaluna by Janell Cannon

This is a great kids’ book that has found wide appeal with lovely drawings and a sweet story. Stellaluna is a baby fruit bat who gets separated from her mother and grows up among the birds. She struggles to adapt to their ways until she meets some fellow bats who reveal that there are other, more bat-like ways to do things. The takeaway is that it’s OK to be strange and different. A good message, coming from bats.

Bat Bomb: World War II’s Other Secret Weapon by Jack Couffer

OK, this is going to sound like science fiction, but it’s not. During WWII, tasked with coming up with ways to end the war with Japan, a group of scientists, generals, and government officials began to work on a scheme to release clouds of bats over the skies of Japan with incendiary devices attached. The idea was that the bats would roost in buildings, the bombs would go off, and the entire city would catch fire. Their tests were surprisingly and dangerously successful. President Roosevelt was on board. But the plan was eventually shelved in favor of… the atom bomb, and the bats never got to carry out their kamikaze mission. But can you imagine? File under: stuff you can’t make up.

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block

OK, so this book is not about bats, but I couldn’t resist with this character! Growing up in a dreamy ’80s Los Angeles with plenty of freaks and geeks around her, Weetzie Bat is a cherished character for those who are or have been (or even have never been, like me) a teenage girl. If you want a quirky trip back to the ’80s, this is the book for you. Again, nothing to do with bats. But they’re making a movie of it, so now might be the time to revisit Punky Brewster’s cooler older sister.

Bat Ecology by Thomas H. Kunz and M. Brock Fenton

If you’re getting really serious and scientific about bats, this is the ONLY book for you. It’s the bat bible, and just about as thick. It’s tough to parse without a biologist’s vocabulary (all the bats are referred to in their Latinate names, for example), but there are some fascinating papers within. One of the parts I enjoyed most explained (with diagrams) all the methods scientists might use to capture bats, and how to do it yourself, if you were conducting a study. The mechanics of bat pollination, echolocation, behavior, and aerodynamics can all be found here. Interested in “The Consequences of Polyovulation for Life-History Variation among Bats”? This is the book for you.

Dune by Frank Herbert

OK, Dune isn’t a book about bats either, but it is a sci-fi classic. And it is set in the desert, so it was a big influence on my book, which takes place on an earth that has become a lot more like the planet Arakis. In Dune, bats are the carrier pigeons, and Herbert’s desert people, the Fremen, use them to send long-range messages. In the Illustrated Dune there is a drawing of the scene where Hawat “took a tiny tube, held it beside the Bat’s head and chattered into the tube; then, lifting the creature high, he threw it upward.” The message is imprinted into the bat’s neural pathways and reflected in its song. Someone with a decoding machine can extract the hidden message in the song of the bat. It’s a beautiful idea, but the reality of bats is no less astounding. Recently it was discovered that bats’ songs are complex and contain many markers and variations, rivaled only by whale songs for their complexity and amount of information they carry. They are pitched too high for humans to hear.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson

I suppose there’s no way to write this list without mention of Batman. He generally does bats justice, I feel. But the Dark Knight series was a watershed moment in graphic novels. The urban, gritty feel of Dark Knight was 180 degrees from Adam West’s KA-POW! Batman and all the superhero shtick of early comic books. This series marked a serious departure into dark and disturbing themes, definitely meant for adults. My book features many illustrations and graphic devices throughout, and I’ve long thought that graphic novels deserve a place in the pantheon of literature. Serving as inspiration for the more recent Batman films, The Dark Knight will certainly be among those remembered. Like Batman, bats are misunderstood outsiders, but ultimately do much good for humankind!

Bats at the Library by Brian Lies

Another children’s book, and one in a series: Lies’s bats go everywhere — the beach, the ballgame, the stage. I chose the library because, well, books. But also, bats were recently discovered living in two libraries in Portugal. The librarians have long tolerated them because the bats eat moths that would otherwise threaten to destroy the old and valuable books they are trying to preserve (we’re talking literal bookworms here: they aren’t a good thing for old books!). So, in exchange for cleaning up a bit of guano, the librarians keep the bats around as most useful exterminators. Another instance of bats being incredibly helpful to humans!

The Bat-Poet by Randall Jarrell

The main character here is a bat. As in Stellaluna, bats are different, and Jarrell makes much of that difference. Here the bat is, well, a bat-poet, and this children’s animal story functions as a sly metaphor on the writing life, and the isolation it can engender. Recommended for poets. Get the edition with illustrations by Maurice Sendak because: illustrations by Maurice Sendak!


Great night for Central Texas bats as a strong seabreeze pushes moths toward the Hill Country while a North front brings reverse migrating moths back from the northland, making a smorgasborg for Mexican free-tailed bats fattening up for their own migration south at the end of the month.  This year’s pups are packing on the grams preparing for their first big journey.  Their is a lot going on in this video as the Hill Country roosts are perfectly situated to take full advantage of both fronts.

Here’s the Congress Avenue Bridge bats that same night going with the seabreeze to the NW, to feed on moths pushed along on the leading edge of the front.


Last year I purchased an art piece for my friends at Austin Bat Refuge, Lee and Dianne; the art work is by Kitty Cantrell.  It is her rock art ” Little Brown Bats”  It is several little browns on a rock wall and it’s very life like.  A few weekends ago Lee and Dianne had a Evening Bat come in for rescue.  Evening Bats look a lot like Little Browns except they are smaller and darker color.  Sometimes the bats that come in are tested in smaller places to see how well they can fly after necessary rehabilitation has been given.  The little bat was enjoying a flight around the front room.  Little Evening Bats can fly very swiftly and can crawl on the ground even faster.  Its like chasing a cock roach.  They can land very suddenly and tuck themselves away in the smallest of places.  They are crevice bats after all.  Flying around she decided to take a quick stop so fast she almost wasn’t seen.  Dianne noticed she had landed and tucked herself right up against one of the Little Brown Bats on the rock art.  The little bat was  probably wondering why her new found family members weren’t putting off any body heat and why they weren’t clicking to her to greet her.  Never the less, she knew she was safe with her new family.  She was so happy she even fell asleep all snuggled up to them.  Some people mistakenly think that bats can’t see well!  That is a myth!  They see quite fine day or night.  As for Kitty’s art it has been Little Bat tested and Little Bat approved!  And to me that is how life-like her art is!  I truly Love and believe in Lee, Dianne and Kitty’s missions to make life better and beautiful in the appreciation of Bats and other wildlife.  Thanks for reading!  Marsha
Kitty Cantrell little brown wall hanging


This eastern screech was so focused on our bats, that he allowed us to approach to within 6 feet before finally flying off!  The rehabilitating bats are working on their flight skills and for that reason, they attract even more attention from local owls.
Our Mexican free-tail Bernie has a permanently injured wrist but was roaming the flight cage last night.  But for the netting, he would have been scooped up in an instant by this owl.

eastern screech owl