This eastern red pup is one of the four pups that Laurie rescued. He was found with his mum on the ground near their house. They would all have died without her taking time from her busy day to care for this family in need. Thanks so much Laurie!
Here one of the boys catches a moth in his tail membrane. They are growing up and going from little fluff balls to bad-ass bug killing predators.
“These tomatoes are almost as red as my fur! Looks like they are ready to be eaten!”- Gabe the red bat
This season’s garden is a hit! Our flight cage is bursting with summer colors as our cherry tomatoes ripen, and our eastern red bats enjoy pampering from volunteers. The garden growing within the flight cage offers a natural, and energized environment for our bats. By attracting moths, the garden allows bats to practice their predatory skills during flight. Offering bats in rehabilitation an opportunity to exercise behaviors that are necessary to survival in the wild make the flight cage and the bat garden an important part of our rehabilitation process. An appreciation for the summer crop is shared by the bats and also our volunteers, who enjoy snacking on sweet, refreshing cherry tomatoes while working hard in the summer heat
Went batting last night in East Austin. Picked up mostly Tabr (Mexican free-tailed bats) around Mueller Lake Park. Walking through an adjoining neighborhood with streets overhung with elm trees we picked up a beautiful call sequence from a tri-colored bat (Perymyotis subflavus), loud and clear.
We’ve released quite a few over the last year, one earlier this spring. Wonder if that’s her?
What a great week this has been out in Tucson, Arizona! We got to participate in the first bat echolocation symposium that has taken place for 15 years, as experts from around the world discussed their life-long research on bat neurophysiology, bat behavioral ecology, and bat conservation science.
Below left: A call sequence from a Myotis yumanensis (Yuma myotis) recorded during the Symposium.
Below right: An analysed call taken from that sequence.
Below: Passive monitoring during the Symposium. The Sonoran Desert had sprung to life that week. The ocotillo was blooming everywhere.
Below: Active monitoring under the palms at a Tucson park. Western yellows and velifers were common.
Below: The group gathers at dusk, cementing new friendships over a last night of batting.
Chris Corben creator of Anabat, and Joe Szewczak creator of SonoBat, shared their expertise.
Below: How wonderful to see these bat experts, know to us previously only by their research, out in the field celebrating the joy of batting. There some bat big shots in this walkabout and they all retain the sense of wonder that drew them to the field.
Joe Szewczak (left) shares with Martyn, Toby, Alice, Katherine, and Brian.
Thanks so much everyone for freely sharing your knowledge and vision all for the greater good of bat conservation.
We dearly hope it will lead to a lifetime of collaboration and friendships.
We’ve always wondered why every morning we find whole moths floating in the water of the drinking trough, in the bat garden. These are whole moths, not just the wings we would expect to find, when bats catch the moths, shuck the wings, and eat the rest.
So why so many whole, often live, moths in the water?
Here a Seminole bat controls a moth
Last night we finally got proof of what we suspected to be the reason.
We have a blacklight that attracts insects into the garden. It hangs from the center ridge of the aviary and is directly over the drinking pool. The pool is also situated in the center so that it collects the drips from the misters, which are also hung from the center ridge.
Our flight school bats fly in wide circles that are tangent to the light, so that they can catch any moth that happens to be flying at the wrong place at the wrong time. When they catch one, they curl up into a ball as they fly, to control the moth and bring it up to their mouths.
If one watches a moth circle under the light, within seconds a bat will zoom in and snatch the moth.
Last night we watched while evening bats did just that. 
But in between catches of fluttering moths, we noticed times where moths we were watching, just before a bat swooped in, would fold their wings and plummet downwards, splash-landing in the pool!
We have often heard of moths evolving defenses to counter the amazing bio-sonar the bats employ to hunt them. This arms race has been going on since bats developed echolocation around 25 million years ago, and has manifested in countless ways ever since. Some moth species have it hard-wired in their DNA that, upon hearing bat bio-sonar, their synapses fire in such a way that paralyzes their wings, causing them to plummet downward, away from the bats closing trajectory. This seems to work quite well, unless the moths just happen to be over our bat drinking trough!
So now we know why so many moths are found each morning in the pool! We just may move the light location so that these moths land in the garden instead, and rise once more to provide additional foraging opportunities for our bats as they hone their hunting skills. This will be a big benefit when we have a full house of bats in flight school, with not enough moths to go around.
We love these little insights that nightly observation provides in the aviary!
Look like a pine cone to you? That’s what this beautiful hoary bat wants you to think. Let’s see who she really is!
hoary bat pine cone
Found on the ground at the University of Texas and brought to us by Carin Peterson and Rachel Ellerd of UT Animal MakeSafe
The following is our favorite impression of this bat. Wonderful photo by Carin Peterson.
hoary bat sloth slat bloth eskimo parka bat
hoary bat
hoary bat
Imagine how different this map view must have looked to her with all the night lighting, as she flew through on her spring migration. According to Bats of Texas by Ammerman et al 2012, hoary bat females have been documented as traveling as far as 1800 km during their migration. What caused her to end up grounded at 2317 Speedway on the UT campus? She seems completely alert and healthy. Had she been looking for a drink from the Turtle Pond?
Did the lights disorient her as she was migrating to her summer grounds up north? Maybe she was feeding around the lights on campus and not having much luck.
UT hoary bat’s eye view
She was emaciated and even after 3 cc’s of blended mealworms we could still see her backbone through her belly. She’s likely pregnant (since mating season is in the fall for hoary bats) so she must have been ravenous and could have ended up on the ground weak from hunger.
Was she migrating with a group of other females? The males don’t travel with the females to the summer grounds, they summer in the western states while the females head north and east.
hoary bat first night in flight cage
The first night in the flight cage she flew but not for long. Just one trip down and one trip back, so we don’t know if she sustains flight.
hoary bat flight cage
She did love being outdoors, even in the rain. She didn’t seek shelter when the heavy rains came in so she was pretty cold and wet in the morning, but no worse for the wear.
hoary bat flight cage
Her forearm length of 57 mm is at the top of the range for this species (46-58 mm) and her body length from nose to base of tail of 90mm is also above the average 80 mm. This is what we would expect since females are larger than males. However, her weigth of 27.8g is not as high on the scale (20-35 g) as we would expect given her length. Her body/mass index of 0.49 seems substantial, but the eyeball test says she seems in need of a few more good meals. A rough measure of her wingspan, performed by stretching one wing out and doubling the nose to tip measurement, came out around 400 mm or about 15-3/4″. We obviously did not stretch the wing completely out, just as much as we could without causing discomfort this being a live bat and not a specimen, so this is probably quite a bit shorter than what we might expect to find.
It’s striking to us that her feet (11 mm) are so much larger and stronger than other Lasiurans.
hoary bat flight cage
hoary bat in pine tree
hoary bat in pine tree
hoary bat in pine tree
hoary bat in pine tree
One night later, she’s flying now
Look at that beautiful golden fur all the way out past her wrists
hoary bat flying
According to Bats of Texas, Ammerman et al 2012, hoary bats represented 41% (1,023 of 2,486) of all bat fatalities at wind-energy facilities. Males represent an even higher proportion (89%) of bats killed at Rocky Mountain wind farms (Kuntz et al. 2007), most of those adult males during fall migrations (Arnett et al 2008).
She has quite a task ahead of her making it up to the north country and raising her pups this summer. We hope we can set her back on track after her Austin pit stop.
She’s lightning fast so photos are tough to get without a painstaking setup. But even though it’s blury, this photo really shows the magnificent sweep of her downstroke
She’s still only 28.1 grams soaking wet this morning.
This shot shows the pigment of her upper wing membrane changes color corresponding to the glorious fur under her wing.
It’s hard to believe the “pinecone” can drop from the branch and become this amazing flying dynamo.
hoary bat Swiss chard
Here’s a photo of our girl as she leaped out of the hand to resume her migration. We set her back on course headed northeast over Mueller Lakes last night. We are thrilled we were able to participate in her recovery after she was rescued by Carin Peterson and Rachel Ellerd at UT Animal MakeSafe. After a week or so of good meals, her weight increased from 27 grams to around 33 grams at the time of release, so she will be well fortified to journey up through Arkansas to her summer grounds in the northeast where she’ll give birth and raise her two pups.
Give us a wave when you and the pups pass overhead this fall sweetheart, it was great getting to know you!
hoary bat release
P.S. – On your way north you might see some big revolving things that look like maybe they are trees you could feed around. They are wind turbines! We know you are inquisitive, but please just stay away from them. And tell the kids!
Yes she has teeth, but she’s not snarling, just echolocating, to see in the dark and to find one of the juicy moths or beetles flying about the enclosure. After parsing many call sequences from that evening, we analyzed this one call out of a call sequence we think is hers. Many of our local species, including yellows are not in standard call libraries, but this call is similar to others we have recorded from northern yellows. We hope to get a voucher call when she is released soon. Voucher calls are recorded from a hand-released bat when no others are flying in the immediate vicinity. They form the basis of call libraries and that is what we’ll use to develop our own.
