A night in the day of a bat worker

One of the blessings of bat rehab in Central Texas is that there are many warm nights when bats will become active.  This gives us an opportunity to work with our rehabilitating bats and not simply feed them night after night when they are brought into the heated bat shack to escape the cold.

Tonight we got a chance to check out a Mexican free-tailed bat that had been brought in a while back by Sara Hoke.
He would have been a goner had Sara not taken time out of her day to rescue him.
His wild heart was “rattling the bars of his cage” tonight, so we asked him to show us what he can do.

Nice! He’s a great flyer. We were able to confirm that he sustained flight because we caught him on camera a few minutes later.
We could tell him from the color we applied to his left ear and marked on his ID tag.
This is just another example of a perfectly capable little bat that just had bad luck that one night.
He just needed a second chance.

We won’t be able to catch him in the flight cage tonight, so we’ll locate him in the morning.  He’ll likely be roosting with the other free-tails in the flight cage bat box.  If the weather holds, we’ll release him at Congress Avenue Bridge the next night.  But we may have to wait for a two or three day window of warm weather to ensure he settles comfortable with the colony.  We don’t want to release him on  a cold night when no other bats are flying and sometimes it takes two nights of warm weather for the colony to decide  it’s worth the energy expenditure to fly.

Another bat that needed a look was this little tri-colored bat 18-230.  She was roosting above in a 3rd story breezeway for at least ten days without moving at all, according  to the caller.  We were asked to relocate her because the rescuer was scared of bats in general and she was also worried the bat might  be sick.
This bat has been extremely hard to feed during all this cold weather as she doesn’t like any of our standard go to food or even treats.  She has not eaten one morsel of food voluntarily.  Usually tri-colored bats will strike at their food if you hold it close in front of their noses. Not this pup.  Her mouth has to be cranked open and food squeezed in.  Even then she will shake her head and sling most of it all over the place. What a struggle!

We’re so happy that warm weather arrived so we can let her forage in the aviary. We got her to fly by trying to feed her, causing her to walk away over the top of her pup tent, and as we continued to chase her with food, she finally took flight.
She immediately dipped down for a drink and here’s a fuzzy photo of her, dripping wet, with an evening bat behind her, in close pursuit.

She turns out to be a great hunter, flying slowly in circles tangent to the black light, hoping to catch an unwary moth.
the moths start flying in very fast erratic loops when a bat approaches.  They hear the bats echolocation and that triggers evasive maneuvers that been developed over about 25 million years as bats and moths co-evolved. It’s amazing to see what bats have to do to catch them.
Here’s the tri-colored with her sights trained on a moth. We love these action shots, even though they are rarely in focus.
Check out the collard greens, broccoli, and kale in the moth garden.  Moths smell these brassicas from far away and come to lay eggs on the crops.

And in this next photo, she’s swooping up from down below, as the moth tries to evade her by staying close to the netting.

Diva, the Seminole bat, continues to make progress and is flying faster and carving her turns much better than in early fall.

One of the evening bats is zooming around the cage leaving a sonic boom in his wake worthy of any night fury.

We gave Rosa a chance to fly at dusk, but she seems to know she is not up to it.  She was still curled up an hour after dark, so we zipped her back up in her pup tent.

And a juvy possum has decided the top of the aviary is a great place to live.  He was hiding under one of the triangular shade tarps, maybe to stay out of sight of owls.
We really don’t trust him to leave the bats alone, and we don’t know if the bats would necessarily wake up if he decided to try to catch one napping.  So, in spite of him being just impossibly cute, we are discouraging him from hanging out at the refuge.  We’ll see how that works out!