Good Bye Little Pup! Live Long & Fly High!
Oh sweet pup! It was so great seeing you grow up!
All the best in your new life!
Wild & Free!
Oh sweet pup! It was so great seeing you grow up!
All the best in your new life!
Wild & Free!
It’s a good day to be a bat!
Look out world, The Class of 2017 is on the loose! Well, reds and evening bats, anyway.
Now that the heat of summer has passed and ponds and tanks are full, it’s a perfect time to get the pups out and let them establish territories before winter.
What fun to see the precocious pups bolt out immediately, followed by the mums, and watch as they circle back and coax out the others. After a half hour all were hunting the treetops, circling high above in the night sky!
Blessings little pups! We’ll miss you! Live long and make lots more baby bats!
Thanks for all the good wishes, everyone! We’re doing ok. The trees are still standing, although they looked as if they were in a washing machine for the last few days. The pups are doing fine. They seem to prefer their leaf umbrellas to the covered areas to which we continue to bring them. When they do fly, they get buffeted by the strong gusts and soon land, but they needed to learn about all this. The adults that shelter under leaves stay fluffed out, while the pups get wet and stay soaked, so it must be a learned behavior to shake off the rain and stay warm. We still have four more days of rain, so we’re not out of it yet, but at least the winds are easing off some. Rains are much worse to our southeast. Prayers for Houston. We’re ready to help with any bat fallout from trees and bridges.
Moth Roll – In the Calm Before the Storm
Swoop Zone SLO-MO
Are these pups playing tag or is this a jam session? Mexican free-tailed bats have been documented to jam each other’s echolocation signals when competition for food gets intense (see Aaron Corcoran’s research at http://sonarjamming.com) . Do eastern red bats do the same in similarly competitive situations? Here in the flight cage, there are not enough moths for all the 30 plus flying rehab bats. Is this pup following his sibling to practice jamming his call and stealing the moth? Or just playing?
Patrolling the cow peas. Good little helper!
This eastern red girl is from the family brought in by Evan Alcantara from Salem Hill Drive in Austin.
They have thrived here at the Refuge given a second chance and we’re thrilled that they’ll be back out in the wild as soon as the weather breaks.
Here she’s performing a flip-turn at the palm fronds as she shreds the flight cage.
Great emergence at Congress Avenue Bridge tonight. Great fun talking to the tourists from all over the world. Especially the wonderful family from New Jersey whose daughter is going for her Girl Scout Silver Award by creating this website https://sites.google.com/site/maketheworldabattierplace/ Check it out!
They are multi-national, with family from Italy, Spain, and Venezuela and we had great fun surfing Google Earth together. Thanks y’all!
Mount Roraima, Venezuela!