rehabilitation

Tri-colored sonogram / sounds of silence

So our tri-colored bat checks out clean under the black light, no orange fluorescence, no spotting in normal light, we think she’s clean for Pd, no White-nose Syndrome.
She’s not sustaining flight however.  She flew the length of the flight cage once but landed and has only taken short flights since then.  It is said that they are sporadic flyers with a short elliptical flight patterns, so this may be normal.  But she did not fly away when she had the opportunity as we were collecting her, so we’ll need to check her out some more to make sure she has the strength a bat needs to survive in the wild.

On the left is the recording of her call as she made that one flight down the length of the flight cage.  On the right is a call from the reference library of a tri-colored bat in Mammoth Cave State Park in Kentucky from back in 2007.  Tragically, tri-colored bats in that area have been decimated by White-nose Syndrome, numbers have plummeted 80% since it’s arrival in 2013 and that song is likely not heard very often in that area nowadays.  How sad to think of all the bats that have perished from this terrible disease.  And awful to think we’ll likely be dealing with it ourselves in a year or two.

Tri-colored bat sonogram & reference call

She weighs 8 grams!  So surprising that a tiny bat would weigh so much.  She looks about the same size as our evening bat Zonker, not way smaller as we would have expected.

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Tri-colored bat – North Austin

This tri-colored bat was hanging in an apartment building 2nd story hallway in North Austin for the past few days.
She hadn’t left to forage and was soon to attract attention from the maintenance staff, so our good friend Ed Sones brought her in.  She showed just how quick a tri-colored bat can be when Ed was collecting her, but did not fly away, so we’ll need to check for wing damage once she gets more accustomed to us.

Almost all our tri-colored bats come from apartment building hallways on the upper levels.  They must think these open ended hallways are just another cave and perfectly suitable for them; and they would be if it weren’t for all those pesky humans!

Her orange forearms, tiny size, pointy nose, and longer ears all indicate Perimyotis subflavus, formerly Pipistrellus subflavus, commonly known as Tri-colored bat, formerly Eastern Pipistrelle.  Whew, they sure do make it complicated!
Check out her range and species info on our webpage https://austinbatrefuge.org/tri-colored-bat/

 

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Serious Visitor

This eastern screech was so focused on our bats, that he allowed us to approach to within 6 feet before finally flying off!  The rehabilitating bats are working on their flight skills and for that reason, they attract even more attention from local owls.
Our Mexican free-tail Bernie has a permanently injured wrist but was roaming the flight cage last night.  But for the netting, he would have been scooped up in an instant by this owl.

eastern screech owl

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Toe whiskers

Here’s an angle rarely seen of a Mexican free-tailed bat. If you look closely you can see the long “whisker” hairs sticking out between the toes. “Kind of like you honey” a bridge visitor said to his girlfriend this summer, right before she hit him, hard.

Mexican free-tailed bat

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Built for Speed

Mexican free-tailed bat

Mexican free-tailed bats are built for speed.  Their long narrow wings are just one of the adaptations that rank them among the fastest bats.
They are, however, also remarkably agile in tight spaces.  They use bone structure and muscle fibers to change their wing aspect ratio to short and broad, allowing high maneuverability when necessary.

Mexican free-tailed bat

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Moth mystery

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?
DSC_1241

moths, bats, austin bats

bats, moths, austin bats

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. bats, moths, austin bats

bats, moths, austin bats
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!

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Summer Intern Graduates – 2016

Kyndal Irwin Intern Summer 2016

Kyndal Irwin (& Zonker)

Kyndal is a sophmore at the University of Texas and taking a heavy course load in their College of Biological Sciences.  Genetics and Bio-Statistics will serve her well in her career in bat work.
We love having her as part of the team!

Congratulations Austin Bat Girl, on completing the summer intern program at Austin Bat Refuge!
Your dedication went above and beyond a call of duty!
You are now an ABR Certified Bat Handler!

The loving care you gave the Bat Class of 2016 ensured they got the very best start to their new, wild lives.
Or, as you would put it, in your own inimitable way:

“After months of making a determined team, the bats and Austin Bat Refuge are proud to say, that together- WE DID IT! ”
This pup says “I’m ready to be released! Thanks for the help, humans!”

Tonight, many of our bats will return to a life in the wild! Get on with your bat self! We’ll miss you guys, thanks for all the fun!”

austin bat refuge rehabilitation release rescue

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Little Guy “LG”

LG, a northern yellow bat, fell from the top of a very tall palm tree when it was cut down.  He was severely bruised all over his body and was in such great pain that he could barely lift his head when he was brought to Marsha Price, our amazing, wonderful friend and bat-savant at our Houston branch.  Marsha at first thought he had a fracture on his right wing shaft, but after a while she determined that it was just severely bruised.  She nursed him back to health slowly but surely over the next few weeks, to the point where he needed the aviary to see if he would be releasable.  Now that the mum & pups are gone, we can better tell about LG’s flight skills.  Here’s a photo of him cruising the aviary last night and we can see that he has a some damage to a joint in his right wing.

LG Copyright
Upon examination, it is obviously inflamed, so we’ll give him Metacam to reduce the swelling and see if he’ll let us check his range of motion in a few days.
He does fly and land quite well, he just doesn’t fly all night like the yellows we released last week.  We hope he shows enough improvement to be released before winter, but if not, he’ll be well taken care of while helping with our pest control in the flight cage Winter Garden.

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