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!


Here’s your backup water, Scarlet. Tell the girls about it, but don’t tell them you were our favorite. Love you! So happy to see you orphan girls cruising the treetops together! omg that looks like so much fun! Long Life Little Ones!

We first met you Scarlet, when we responded to someone, referred to us by another bat organization, who wanted to know how to feed a bat, didn’t know anything about bats, was not permitted or vaccinated, but also “doesn’t drive” so could not bring the bat in for proper care.  When we first saw you in the big glass jug, we just knew we had to get you out of there.  It took a lot of convincing, but we finally got the “rescuer” to agree to release her to our care.  He planned to keep her in the jug and feed her moths for as long as she survived.  His theory was “it’s like it was dead already since I could capture it”.

We are so happy you came with us Scarlett, and you got that second chance at a wild life.  All our love little bat!

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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!


Our red bat families are all color-coded (with corresponding control numbers) so that we can raise and release them together.  It was the “green family” release time last night and what a joy it was to see them all fly off together on a beautiful summer evening!

These red bats were  found by Brad Fellers on the ground at his Leander home and certainly would have been killed by predators had he not cared enought to save them.  The orphan was saved by Megan Rodriguez near Anderson Mill.
It was our great pleasure to help the pups grow up, turning from little furry blobs of bat blubber into amazing flying, hunting, and self-sufficient wonders of the night sky.

We placed each bat in a pup tent first and one by one we watered, fed, and showed them their back-up drinking trough; the infinity-edged pool that we’ll keep nice and full for them throughout the oncoming drought.
Here’s one of the pups drinking from the pool.

Once all were fed and watered, it was up to the release platform high in a tree above their former enclosure.  They were all super-excited and we first did a controlled release with the mum, then quickly set the pups free to follow her, so they could all stay together.

Here’s the happy family circling high in the sky, celebrating their freedom on a beautiful Texas summer night.  Live long lives little bats and make lots more beautiful bat babies! Thanks for the memories!

Please Donate at https://austinbatrefuge.org/donations/ to support Austin’s amazing bats!


We were contacted a few weeks ago by a German ecological consultant on sabbatical, who has been traveling the world for the last year or so.  Starting six months ago she was in Patagonia, then in the Brazilian Pantanal, far upstream in the Amazon, and in Montreal, before volunteering with us for three weeks.  An intrepid traveler, she has been camping in the jungles and couch-surfing the cities of the world before arriving at facility with an open mind and an open heart, sharing wonderful stories from her travels.

What a joy it was to get to know her!  She is a true citizen of the world, and she filled us with hope for the future!  As a global ambassador, her ability to share the wonder of the natural world did her country proud!  Fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and who knows how many other languages, her light shines brightly and we are so happy she came to stay with us for this short while!

Lisa Soehn, you are a spectacular human being!  May that twinkle in your eye continue to spread to all you meet!
Love always from Texas!

Lisa Soehn



Our first pup of the year, an evening bat, snuggling under his proud mum.

We had a naming contest for Mother’s Da and got so many great suggestions; we loved them all!

Radar got the most votes, but we all have our personal favorites.

You’ll be seeing those other names soon as this year’s pups roll in!


After the crowds leave Congress Avenue Bridge, a few more bats take flight!
All the best girls!


Funny (and informative) post from David Curiel, the concierge at the Whisper Valley community.

Lone bat found on our solar equipment! from Austin


We’re not usually ones to toot our own horns, but these notes in our Bat Journal on our Information Table at Congress Avenue Bridge meant a lot to us.

Laura is great friends with Adria Lopez Baucells, whom we greatly admire, and Jordi knows Carles Flaquer, who visited our facility a few years back and is a wonderful person and dear friend.

Congress Bridge feedback

Congress bats climbed to altitude directly over the bridge Saturday night, then turned & headed way South, with the wind. Great visit with Laura & Jordi from Barcelona!  These lovely and gracious scientists are friends of our favorite bat people Adrià López Baucells & Carles Flaquer from Museu de Ciències Naturals de Granollers. This group is doing great work and we just love them. Look them up, follow them, and be awed!


Hola from Costa Rica,

 

Just a quick recap, in case you have not read my previous blog posts! I am currently in Costa Rica using two Wildlife Acoustics SM4Bat full spectrum recorders to track bat presence and activity across the country over a ten-week period. My plan is to collect data here and, upon returning to the U.S., running the data through the Kaleidoscope Pro acoustic analysis program with auto-ID technology to try to determine what bats we find where.

 

This is the beginning of my seventh week in the country and my second week at Las Cruces Biological Station. Last week we conducted our research at the station. The week prior, we were in Manuel Antonio, a very popular tourist town on the coast known for its National Park and beautiful beaches. This week and the next we are visiting privately owned plots of land with forest fragments.  I did very little research in Manuel Antonio because I did not feel comfortable leaving my recorders overnight unattended in such a heavily populated place. I can easily lock the recording box to the tree with a heavy-duty lock, but the microphone and cable attach to the outside and could be easily removed and stolen. So, always take care of your equipment, first and foremost. Because, if you lose your equipment, you lose your experiment.

 

I consider this blog a way to impart wisdom on future researchers and animal activists. I have learned a lot while traveling the country and visiting different research stations and locations. Please, do not take anything I say as complaining or badmouthing, I just want to share information and experiences. We have come across some quote unquote issues while being here that I wish I could have foreseen.

  1. Some institutions issue their stipends differently than others; some will pay you in full upfront, some will pay you half when you start and half when you finish, and some will pay you biweekly. Also, if you get paid biweekly, (like any other job) you may be paid a pay period behind schedule and therefore not receive payment until the end of the first month you are there. This is something you should figure out before you leave for your trip and plan your finances accordingly. We have experienced some difficulties in stipend distribution amongst the group members (e.g. some people being paid weekly and some biweekly and some not the full amount). I am sure this will all work out in the end, but it is something I absolutely did not consider to be possible. Also, a few of our visits were to ecotourist businesses where we had to pay out of pocket entrance fees. We will be reimbursed for this later, but, it would have been nice to know beforehand. I feel like this is a weird policy because it is imposing a personal cost on researchers who may or may not have the funds, but apparently it is a pretty common practice.
  2. We had a box of equipment get stuck in customs for over 3 weeks, causing some serious delays in other peoples’ parts of the project, especially since we have moved locations. Anything you think you may need extras of, even if you think “it will be ok”, get them before you leave the country or make sure you have an in-country vendor. The only equipment of mind that I am missing out on are extra microphone covers. The first night I put my recorders out for a test run at La Selva, something chewed a hold in one of my microphone covers. It was only then that I realized, maybe it would have been useful to have extras! Oops! Thankfully the cover was not chewed completely as to where it affected the weatherproof-ness.

 

We are still in the field almost every day. I have 29 days left here before I return to the US to parse through my data and decipher the implications of what I have found. I am really excited and equally nervous to be responsible for going through ten weeks of data! On average, my recorders pick up 1,000 calls a night. But, in some locations, I have picked up as few as 3 calls to over 4,500 recordings in a night. At the sites where I can get 4+ consecutive nights of data, trends start to emerge. My ideal study design would be to have 10+ recorders spread across the country with extra extra large SD cards so they could be left for months at a time, showing temporal and spatial patterns of bat presence and activity. I have made some pretty interesting scatter plots of activity, just playing around with what I have so far. I will share what I am allowed when I can…later!

 

I want to end this blog on a positive note. As mentioned in my previous blogs, there is a girl doing research on the social implications of payment for ecosystem services (where people are paid by the government to not cut down the forest on their property, hence paying them for the services the remaining ecosystem provides). She has found that people in this area are much better informed of the benefits of having bats on their property and in their forests and on their farms. There is less fear and more excitement over bats. They see them as something necessary and without which, the forest would suffer. She reminds me people across the world do not all have the same information and associations we do about our flying friends. What we, as concerned and caring citizens of the world, need to do is have patience and understanding, spreading positive and informative narratives of bats. All it takes is conversation and interaction to change a mind and influence the future.

 

As always, feel free to contact me with questions or comments (ahall6@stedwards.edu).

 

Squeak squeak,

Amy