Eeyore is the grumpy donkey in the classic children’s tale Winnie-the-Poo.
He mopes around so much that his buddies throw him a birthday party to cheer him up.
Well, even bat workers can get a little mopey when things don’t go well for bats. And bats have hard lives.
This year, the local non-profit organization The Friends of the Forest Foundation cheered up Austin Bat Refuge with a wonderful donation from the proceeds of Eeyore’s Birthday Party!
Thanks so much from us at ABR to this wonderful organization that has been giving back to the community for decades!
Wow! This brought a huge smile to all our faces! Love you all!
Please join us all in cheering up Eeyore again next year on April 27, 2019 (always the last Saturday in April).
Next year’s event will be Eeyore’s 56th Birthday Party!
Please bookmark eeyores.org, put on a costume (or nothing at all!) and meet us there!
Thank You Lori Moore – and all the good people at FotFF for the very generous donation!
This four-month old female was found on a bitter cold and wet morning hanging low on a door screen.
Great work by Wesley who contained her and brought her to us to warm up and rehydrate.
She is brand new here in the video and still bewildered by the strange turn of events.
Central Texas bats had left their roosts to forage on another warm night when the coldest mid-October norther for years swept into Central Texas.
We think she got wet, cold, and blown around, so she sought shelter anywhere she could.
She’s this year’s pup and her inexperience led her to roost in a vulnerable location.
A cat, dog, bird, or human could have harmed her, so Wesley brought her in for some TLC until it warms enough to release her near her cave.
When they are found in an exposed location, such as on the ground or on a wall just a foot or two above the ground, they are vulnerable to predators or fearful humans. This usually means something is wrong and when strong cold fronts move in, with strong winds and rain, that is often times all that is wrong. Simply moving them to a safe location is enough. Check out website’s Have You Found a Bat page.
What an amazing bat!
She is fierce and when she spreads her wings and opens her mouth, she is the most beautiful bat in town!
What a priviledge for us to get to help her out a little.
We received several calls today from homeowners, apartment managers and schools, saying that anywhere from 30-200 bats swarmed onto their buildings this morning, and are now roosting in clusters. This certainly can be startling—especially to people who know little about bats except that they fly at night and roost in Congress Avenue Bridge.
We want to reassure the public that this occurrence, while somewhat dramatic (and yes, scary to some), is not a threat to people living or working in these buildings. We think this may be the first wave of free-tailed bats making their way through Central Texas from their northern range; that hypothesis supported by an upsurge in bat numbers on Doppler radar. These bats will likely move on, either tonight or within a day or two.
Bats do not present a danger if you don’t try to handle them and simply leave them alone. However, if a bat is on the ground or in reach of children, it may be appropriate to safely contain the bat by following the instructions at https://austinbatrefuge.org/found-a-bat/. The bat can then be brought to Austin Bat Refuge IF there has been no bite contact between the bat and a person or a pet.
Please Remember: The vast majority of bats do not have rabies, and they are not carriers of rabies. Most bats are gentle, non-aggressive creatures, but may bite if threatened. So just don’t handle bats!
Mothra was brought to us by Erika Rix back on 18May2015.
Erica opened her garden shed for the first time since the fall, and discovered a bat with a tiny newborn. She was super excited and quietly closed the door so as not to disturb them.
The next day however, the mother was gone, leaving the pup to fend for herself all day. The pup got weaker and weaker and eventually fell to the floor of the shed, where Erica found her, late that night, umbilicus still attached. She scooped her up and brought her to us the next day. This was the start of a three year rehabilitaion project that brought us an immeasurable amount of joy. Nice work, Erika!
The first few days were dicey, but she accepted the milk replacement formula we fed her every two hours, and she liked her warm roost.
At the time we were short-staffed, so that meant that in a few days, a carpenter dude (me!) had to bring her to work, a remodeling project that was in the framing stage with lots of noise and action. We used a sugar glider bonding pouch to keep her safe, worn inside a shirt. Even though the pouch was against a body, it really wasn’t warm enough for her to thrive. And the constant motion and noise was not the best. Even so, she hung on, clinging to life, but fading over the next five days. Thankfullly help arrived as Dianne got back in town after a week at an urban wildlife conference, and diagnosed her problem as a lack of body heat and quiet. The little pup responded immediately to her care (yay Dianne!) and finally seemed to stabilize enought to where we felt we could give her a name, Mothra!
She became a beautiful juvenile velifer!
Look at these elegant toe nails!
Some people think they are a rather plain bat, but we beg to differ! They have a subtle, yet radiant, beauty that is undeniable!
She became a real joy to us as we watched her progress through the stages of pup-hood, jumping out of our hands as she took her first flights around the room. What a cutie!
Once she was weaned and eating mealworms from a coop cup, it was time for the flight cage.
Here are some of her first flights. She has a look of triumph on her face as she lands on the far wall, as if to say “I made it all the way down here!”
We watched with pride as she became a magnificent flyer, and even saw her catch one of her first moths! This was exciting for us because many people believed that an orphaned bat would not learn to hunt without a mother. Well this girl did!
We noticed that her wing tips were rounded, compared to most of our bats, and we thought it might be an abnormality due to the milk formula.
We had no other velifers with which to compare her, so we did not realize that this is completely normal for the species!
Since we raised her from day 2 and she had no conspecifics, she was friendlier that most bat pups. We would go out each morning and hold her against our necks to warm her up, then feed her breakfast while we watched the sunrise. These were great days for us, to love a bat pup and have her love us back unabashedly. She was very playful and loved to land in the middle of our backs, then fly off when we tried to reach for her. We think this was because she had no other velifer pups with which to play and we were her family.
But it also made us very nervous about releasing her and worrying what would happen if she did this to a human she did not know. The only velifer caves we knew about were in the middle of neighborhoods and were often visited by the most dangerous animal on the planet, young humans! She would not survive a close encounter or a landing on the back of such a creature.
And so she stayed with us. Slowly but surely, she visited us less often, especially once we got two more non-releasable velifers. She formed a new family with them and, over time, learned how to be a velifer. We continued our search for caves that were protected and not within densly-packed neighborhoods in Brushy Creek MUD. Bats from culverts in Brushy Creek sometimes come to us with what appear to be human-caused injuries.
We finally got word of just such a protected cave this summer that has a few thousand velifers and tri-colored bats roosting within. We secured permission from the owners to bring Mothra, two other velifers, and three tri-colored bats (PipPup!) there for release.
It is a beauty of a cave and we felt so good about this spot.
We really stepped up the food and water for these bats starting a week before release and then took goodbye videos before they were gone from our lives.
Then it was down to the cave mouth to show her new home.
Having never seen a cave, she was pretty anxious, but she knew something momentous was about to happen.
Soon wild velifers started pouring from the cave mouth as we held her on a rock high above.
After all these years, we had hoped for a beautiful release, but rarely do things work out as planned for our videos.
But it worked out for Mothra! Here she drops into the stream of wild bats and although it was pretty dark, we’re sure she joined the stream of exiting bats and joined them in their evening feed. We can only hope that come dawn, she followed them back into the cave that we showed her earlier and made it her new home.
Love you Mothra. May the bat gods keep you safe. What a priviledge and an honor it was to know you. You’ll always be family to us!
The female pip (The Pip Mum) was in trouble here on this stair tread. She could have been stepped on or mauled by a cat or dog.
The adjacent apartment renter’s mother was visiting her pregnant daughter and called to have the bat removed.
She really wanted a bat disposal service and would not assist or even be present when we arrived to rescue this little bat.
It was not until we mentioned that this little bat girl was also likely pregnant, that she took interest and then desperately wanted to meet the bat.
The bat was dehydrated and not well nourished, but uninjured. In the early photos and videos she is noticeable skinny.
There were not many drinking sources around the area except swimming pools, so perhaps the chlorine water was getting to her.
We brought her in for hydration therapy and good food to build her strength.
After a few weeks, she had put on weight, but we noticed that she was beautifully rounded even between feedings.
She was indeed pregnant!
We thought she would have twins, as is likely for tri-colored bats, but soon we discovered it was just the one pup,
a beautiful little ball of bat blubber, found nursing under her wing.
Just a few days later, she has a little fur and her body and HER EARS! are quite a bit longer.
At this point, we still did not know the sex of the pup, since we were so reluctant to disturb mum & pup.
A week later she is more fully furred and helping with the family hang!
A bit later and she would give mum a break from nursing from time to time.
After a few weeks of watching, we finally had to check to see if she was a boy or a girl.
We picked her up (A GIRL!) and she gave a squawk while exploding into a twisting, evasive flight!
Here she is flying at 2-1/2 weeks of age. CUTE!
We watched her grow up over the next few months, while we got them through the wicked drought this summer.
We saw her become a skilled hunter as she practiced catching moths under the flight cage lights.
Pip pup learing to hunt at around 5 weeks
Eyeballing a moth 1-1/2 months
Mastering the Tail Grab (moth rolled up inside tail membrane) 2 months
Here you can see her face behind the translucent tail membrane that covers it, as she bites a moth she has just scooped up.
This was so much fun to watch!!!
The normal mother / daughter dynamics played out during this time as the pup became quite a handful for the mum.
The weaning process is always a difficult time for both and it went on for quite a few weeks until they finally started roosting together again.
We fed them (and all 40 free-ranging bats) one mealworm at a time all summer long!
The pip pup (below) was hand-fed 1,200 mealworms while we had her! Her mum 1,500!
Finally the rains that broke the drought ended and we were able to take her and her mum to release.
They were accompanied by another tri-colored bat and three cave myotis.
Here is the pip pup, the day of her release.
It’s so great to see what our pups (they are all pups to us) will see when they come home at dawn.
We released the pip pup and her mum at dark, into a stream of bats leaving the cave. We feel sure that they will join the colony in foraging and follow them home to this wonderful roost.
Thanks so much everybody who cared for these bats!!! This is what love looks like!!!
The Release!
Mum leads the way, calling to her pup, saying, “Time to make a break for it!!! Let’s go!!!”
We’re so happy to see them go to such a great home. Thanks universe, for getting something right!
Look at these elegant toe nails!
Some people think they are a rather plain bat, but we beg to differ! They have a subtle, yet radiant, beauty that is undeniable!
