By now, the rise of Austin’s “bat culture” has been well documented. As I argue in this article (https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MC/issue/view/2073), bats have become central to Austin’s identity through the efforts of conservationist Merlin Tuttle, who sought to resignify bats as “cool” rather than “scary.”  By replacing images from horror films with images of real bats – and even allowing local citizens to see live bats up-close – Tuttle convinced a city not to fear its resident bat colony, but to celebrate it.  Tuttle’s photography and information campaigns were so successful that tourists visiting Austin will find bat imagery in local restaurants, shops, murals, statuary… you name it.

While researching my article, I sought to understand how Austin’s status as the “Live Music Capital of the World” overlapped with its reputation as the “Bat City.”  Though the two concepts seem unrelated, they intersect in a surprising number of ways. On one hand, images depicting bats in musical poses are surprisingly common –  radio station KMFA’s “listen local” logo is one great example (https://www.kmfa.org/programs/3-listen-local). Additionally, a number of local musicians mobilize bat imagery to express their Austinite identity.  Some of my personal favorites include the Bat City Surfers (https://batcitysurfers.bandcamp.com/), Echo and the Bats (http://www.dailytexanonline.com/2017/07/30/echo-and-the-bats-make-folk-rock-out-of-folktales), and a truly awesome interactive piece by composer Steve Parker (https://www.steve-parker.net/bat-man/).  As I discuss in my article, there are many reasons for bat-music parallels, but they can mostly be boiled down to the efforts of local politicians to identify Austin’s unique character in effort to encourage the presence of tourists.

However, for many people I encountered during my research in Austin, horror imagery remained a significant part of how they related to bats.  Bats’ association with horror originated with the colonization of the Americas, in which Europeans grossly exaggerated their experiences with vampire bats in Mexico and Central America, arguably displacing their fears about unfamiliar Mesoamerican indigenous groups with narratives about vampires. In other words, bats’ use in vampire stories and later horror films and stories are modern adaptations of colonial racism that posited indigenous North Americans as less than human. In addition, as scientific activists like Tuttle have argued, such exaggerated fears lead directly to the unnecessary killing of bat populations by ill-informed citizens and profit-mongering pest control companies.

Throughout my research in Austin I discovered that horror narratives that include bats also serve other social functions within present-day human populations. Some of the artists I interviewed capitalized on the colonial roots of horror narratives in order to express their experiences of marginalization in a white-dominated society. For others, bats’ reputation as Other was intimately linked with Austin’s ethos of alterity – a “weird” animal that represented a “weird” city. Normalizing bats might have been the goal of Tuttle’s education programs, but the popularity of Austin’s Chiropterans is also directly linked to bats’ status as “not normal.”

Interestingly, most of the artists that I interviewed were in favor of bat conservation, even when they used imagery derived directly from damaging fictions associated with horror.  In most cases, the artists I interviewed did not see conservation and horror as mutually exclusive. In my opinion, this is because most Austinite’s use of horror imagery is self-conscious: it is used as a form of commentary on a particular social situation, using camp. irony, and a host of other discursive techniques to articulate both an acceptance of horror imagery and a rejection of it at the same time. In order to understand these artists, then, we need to read between the lines of their imagery, trying to understand how horror imagery expresses precisely what it expresses to them.

Tuttle’s photography has been successful in changing cultural narratives about bats not because he got rid of existing narratives, but because he replaced them with new ones. Similarly, bats’ use by goths and punks in Austin works because it re-signifies the meaning of existing horror imagery – it takes existing cultural depictions and assigns them new meaning based on changing cultural context. We have to understand what this means – and its relationship to colonialism – in order to address it. How can we use bats to acknowledge colonial history while at the same time developing more positive representations that don’t encourage senseless killing?  How can we delve into the source of what we truly fear about bats, what it means, and make it less scary?  How can we create art that truly expresses the complexity of our relationships to bats?


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!


We had a blast at Texas Nature Days at The Texas Memorial Museum!  Thanks for the invite Pam!
It is so much fun to see how excited the children are to see bats up close and personal.
Their little faces are so bright and shiny and full of love; it’s a real priviledge to introduce them to some of our bat ambassadors.
And we loved seeing old friends at the Texas Master Naturalists tables and meeting new friends among them too!

Insert photos here. We never think to take any! Anybody get some good ones?

We’re always happy to help out The Texas Memorial Museum. Their funding was pulled in 2015 and it was touch and go whether or not they’d survive, but thanks to events like this, put together by Pamela Owen, it’s still providing wonderful education opportunities for Texans of all ages.

Here’s a thank you email from Pam the day after the event:

Hello, All:

Saturday’s attendance as a whopping 1697 visitors for the day! This grand total exceeds the 1393 visitors on the inaugural TWD in 2015. During the 10 am to 4 pm activity period, Texas Master Naturalists and UT Austin Entomology interacted with 1520 visitors. Austin Bat Refuge – your 11 am to 1:30 pm activity period was 643 visitors.

Thank you for continuing to help make Texas Wildlife Day such an enjoyable event for the community. The majority of our visitors were first-timers to TMM. We accomplished so much with a team effort, and most especially because of your expertise, enthusiasm, and your valuable volunteer time. With your help TMM continues to offer unique educational and enjoyable experiences for all ages. I am hopeful that I will be working with each of you at Texas Wildlife Day 2020!

Please forward this message to others on your team for whom I do not have an email address.

With gratitude,

Pamela

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Pamela R. Owen, Ph.D.

Associate Director

Texas Memorial Museum

The University of Texas at Austin

 

Tel. 512-232-5511

Email: p.owen@austin.utexas.edu

 

Mailing Address:

Texas Memorial Museum

2400 Trinity St. Stop D1500

Austin, TX 78712-1621


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!

 


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!

 


Every day we say Good Morning to the Evening Bats. “Hi! How are you?” Due to her bent arm Midnight may not be releasable, but she flies well enough to enjoy the aviary and can always hang with us. “Good Bat!”


This Mexican free-tailed skypup is multi-tasking, doing his yoga while eating his breakfast!


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!


He’s a tri-colored juvenile who was learning to fly when he somehow ended up inside the atrium at 600 Congress Avenue in Austin.  So the Congress bats aren’t the only bats living in the heart of downtown! We have gotten tri-coloreds n from this area previously, so we suspect they are well at home in the high-rised parking garages and breezeways that shelter them from predators.


Box employees have a workout room that is open to the atrium, and this juvie spent the day on their jungle gym before Jo and Ian contained him and brought him to us for safer fledging.  Nice work you two!