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.
When the call came in to rescue bats in the University of Texas tower, we were super pumped up!
Carin Peterson, head of UT Animal Make-Safe, had notified us there may be many hundreds of bats trapped behind newly installed pigeon netting on the roof. So we geared up for rescue, readying a dozen habitats to house cold bats in torpor, with the hopes that we could relocate them to safer locations.
We met Carin, along with Anthony and Kurt with the construction company doing the renovations, and headed up the heavily-secured elevators toward the top of the tower. Curt called for a construction break as we traversed the rooftop (omg BATS and bat people!) and climbed down ladders to other roof surfaces. We were disappointed to find that the bats were not in the top of the tower (that apparently is reserved for the resident Peregrine falcon featured in the UT Tower FalconCam) but were around the roof decks below, where two courtyards topped out near the president’s veranda. We did get to see the lights that light the tower orange after big wins, they are strangely green when off. They white lights that light the tower attract lots of insects and are likely why the bats are there in the first place.
The casement windows of offices which faced the courtyards radiate heat which flows up five or six stories and provides a warm area, sheltered from cold winds, for bats to overwinter. The netting was installed a few months ago to prevent pigeons from residing in the courtyard (where office workers had been feeding them) and the bats showed up just three weeks before out visit. It seems the bats recognized that this netted area was not only warm, but now, additionally, provided safety from predatory birds. The 2″ x 2″netting is the type used for baseball batting (bats!) cages, rated for 300 lbs and taughtly strung across the tops of the courtyards and down between adjoining vertical openings to the roof deck. The netting itself is quite expensive (a small section alone was $5,000) and the scaffolding required to install and or modify it likely cost about as much as the netting.
The concern is that bats may have become trapped under the netting with no way to get out. Close inspection seemed to indicate the bats could crawl up the wall surfaces under the stainless steel guy wires that hold the edges of the netting, thus coming and going at will to their new home. The installation was quite good, but there are a number of areas where bats can get through the sides. If bats are entering through the top of the 2×2 mesh, the gaps at the side may be the only way the can get out to feed. Even though bats can easily fly up to hang from the top of netting, we don’t feel that they could crawl or pull their way up throught the 2×2 mesh. A normal bat exclusion allows bats to drop down exclusion tubes to leave a roost, but prevents them from flying back up and in. Any potential exclusion here would be upside down, requiring bats to exit vertically up and prevent them from dropping back down in. Interesting!
Our visit found small clusters of bats in areas out of our reach, so no big bat rescues on this day! Curt said that the bats seem to come and go,as he notices them in varying numbers and locations from day to day. Since we have observed bridge bats surviving up to three weeks of 20F temperatures before surging out again once evening temperatures moderate, we asked Curt to inspect the roof deck below daily to make sure there is no “fallout”, our term for when cold-stunned bats just can’t take it anymore and drop from the bridges. In our experience, they are generally ok when this happens, they simply need to be warmed up, rehydrated, fed, and then can be released.
So inspections in the coming days, should tell us if the bats are ok in this location or if we somehow need to remove them and replace the expensive netting. We feel that smaller mesh netting should have been deployed and efforts made to seal the edges to prevent bat entry. But coexisting with bats may require livng with the newly installed netting, harvesting guano as if collects on roof decks below, and reinstalling the window screens on the casement windows facing the courtyards. If those screens have been lost, then new ones could be ordered and installed using magnetic strips that hold them tight to the metal window frames, preventing any bats from getting in trouble accidentally entering any of the offices.
We remain ready to help in any way possible to promote bat/human co-existence. And who knows, maybe the UT president can wine and dine big donors by hosting bat emergence events on his rooftop veranda! Could be a win, win, win situation; bats, humans, and UT sports!
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.
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.
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!
The female pip (The Pip Mum) was in trouble here on this stair tread. She could have been stepped on or mauled by a cat or dog.
The adjacent apartment renter’s mother was visiting her pregnant daughter and called to have the bat removed.
She really wanted a bat disposal service and would not assist or even be present when we arrived to rescue this little bat.
It was not until we mentioned that this little bat girl was also likely pregnant, that she took interest and then desperately wanted to meet the bat.
The bat was dehydrated and not well nourished, but uninjured. In the early photos and videos she is noticeable skinny.
There were not many drinking sources around the area except swimming pools, so perhaps the chlorine water was getting to her.
We brought her in for hydration therapy and good food to build her strength.
After a few weeks, she had put on weight, but we noticed that she was beautifully rounded even between feedings.
She was indeed pregnant!
We thought she would have twins, as is likely for tri-colored bats, but soon we discovered it was just the one pup,
a beautiful little ball of bat blubber, found nursing under her wing.
Just a few days later, she has a little fur and her body and HER EARS! are quite a bit longer.
At this point, we still did not know the sex of the pup, since we were so reluctant to disturb mum & pup.
A week later she is more fully furred and helping with the family hang!
A bit later and she would give mum a break from nursing from time to time.
After a few weeks of watching, we finally had to check to see if she was a boy or a girl.
We picked her up (A GIRL!) and she gave a squawk while exploding into a twisting, evasive flight!
Here she is flying at 2-1/2 weeks of age. CUTE!
We watched her grow up over the next few months, while we got them through the wicked drought this summer.
We saw her become a skilled hunter as she practiced catching moths under the flight cage lights.
Pip pup learing to hunt at around 5 weeks
Eyeballing a moth 1-1/2 months
Mastering the Tail Grab (moth rolled up inside tail membrane) 2 months
Here you can see her face behind the translucent tail membrane that covers it, as she bites a moth she has just scooped up.
This was so much fun to watch!!!
The normal mother / daughter dynamics played out during this time as the pup became quite a handful for the mum.
The weaning process is always a difficult time for both and it went on for quite a few weeks until they finally started roosting together again.
We fed them (and all 40 free-ranging bats) one mealworm at a time all summer long!
The pip pup (below) was hand-fed 1,200 mealworms while we had her! Her mum 1,500!
Finally the rains that broke the drought ended and we were able to take her and her mum to release.
They were accompanied by another tri-colored bat and three cave myotis.
Here is the pip pup, the day of her release.
It’s so great to see what our pups (they are all pups to us) will see when they come home at dawn.
We released the pip pup and her mum at dark, into a stream of bats leaving the cave. We feel sure that they will join the colony in foraging and follow them home to this wonderful roost.
Thanks so much everybody who cared for these bats!!! This is what love looks like!!!
The Release!
Mum leads the way, calling to her pup, saying, “Time to make a break for it!!! Let’s go!!!”
We’re so happy to see them go to such a great home. Thanks universe, for getting something right!
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!”
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!
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!
