Went to Wimberley to meet a TPWD biologist and assist in swabbing for Pd.  She cancelled due to having run into a nest of seed ticks earlier in the day – Bummer!  But what a beautiful roost!  These bats have chosen a sweet spot to over-winter.  The bridge spans a crystal clear creek that whispers through the cypress roots as it flows from Blue Hole down toward the Blanco.  Hopefully they will be spared the regular spring flooding of the Blanco by roosting a half mile up a tributary to that magnificent and wild river.

Some of the more than 100,000 Tadarida brasiliensis over-wintering here

 


Great visit with sustaining supporter Morgan Klug, who trecked all the way from Las Vegas, Nevada to visit the refuge.  Morgan brought her sister Audrey (who is a vet tech in Vegas) and Audrey’s delightful four year old daughter Kaylee. Their proud mum Tracey accompanied them and mostly took care of Kaylee while her daughters geeked out on bats!  They both donned gloves and hand fed our education bats while we closely supervised.  They seemed to really love the opportunity to get up close and personal with Buffy, Star, and Asia. Below Audrey is feeding Asia while Kaylee is snuggling into Tracey’s jacket.  Thanks so much for coming y’all and for being such great supporters!


Austin Bat Refuge would like to recognize Robin Holt, a founding board member, for her exemplary service as her two-year term expires.

Robin answered the call when we needed her, literally.  When we called, she responded, “Well I’m vacationing in France at the moment, but I’ll come back to Austin right now if you need me.”
What dedication!  Thank you, Robin, for taking time out of you’re busy life to help get ABR off on the right foot.

ABR extends its gratitude, as Robin cycles off the board, and we hope to stay in touch long into the future.

 


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.

congress bridge bat     congress bridge bat

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.

tri-colored bat

 

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.

tri-colored bat

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

seminole bat

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

evening bat

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.

eastern red bat

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!

juvy opossum

juvy opossum


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.
Mothra

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.

cave myotis

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!

 


Hello there, make yourself at home.  Well maybe not that much at home ……

Diva is a beautiful Seminole bat who came to us for flight training.  She did not fly well at first, landing low on the flight cage walls, where we found her each morning for the first week and a half.  Now each morning we find her sleeping high up at the peak of the aviary, meaning she’s flying stronger and can swoop up higher before securing her grip. We can watch her do many flip turns at the top of the cage before finally landing for the day. Good work Diva!


This little eastern red bat boy needs a name!  18-147 just doesn’t have much of a ring to it!
Rescued by Hannah, as grackles surround him on her breezeway floor in San Marcos, she brought him to our info table at the Congress Avenue Bridge last Friday.  He wowed those who witnessed the intake process, and all of us marveled at the beauty of this little pup!

Here he gets another meal of his milk-replacement formula as he gets a supervised introduction to the outdoor reds.

And now a mealworm to top off the tank as the flight cage reds in the background anticipate their breakfast.

And finally he takes his place in the flight cage stair-step heiarchy! (That’s him at the upper right)
He’s so little we’ll have to watch him real closely as he introduces himself to all the others

You can do it little pup!