Surprisingly large blooms from Fern Cave Stuart Cave and Old Tunnel at 7:30 pm last night. Each bloom represents many hundreds of thousands of bats.
We expect big blooms from McNeil Bridge on warm winter nights, but in our experience it’s unusual to see such large blooms from the other roosts.
Win
The Flood family just became new members of the bat protection squad!
Thanks y’all for your act of compassion!
Here’s their post:
“We rescued this darling little Mexican Free-tailed bat earlier this evening as he was grounded in the middle of the road and nearly hit by several passing cars. We brought him home and called Lee and Diane at Austin Bat Refuge…they took him in and knew just what to do! 
💕 Thankfully he had no broken bones and he seemed to be very healthy. Afer some TLC from Lee and Diane @ Austin Bat Refuge, it sounds like he’s going to be ok and will most likely be released back into the wild! 
😊So thankful to them for all they do for these little guys… 💕If you ever find a grounded or injured bat, make sure to give them a call….and donate if you can! They have the biggest hearts for these little guys and do so much to house and care for the injured bats. Good people!!! Good cause!!! “
The strongest cold front in years blew through last week and bats in Austin suffered through the cold and windy nights. Many fell, cold-stunned out of their roosts. But kind-hearted people safely contained some and brought them to us for thawing, some bats every day for a week! We filled their bellies with tasty mealworms and had the pleasure of sharing some Holiday spirit with them. And last night it was finally warm enough to release many of them.
This little guy is your bat Jocelyn. He’s a great bat and he would have died if you hadn’t cared enough to rescue him. Thank You!
And thanks to Christie, Christina, Giselle, and Natalie stopping and taking the time to care for those bats you saved. You are Heroes!
Here’s Natalie’s bat flying off into the night to join the few thousand others overwintering under the Congress Avenue Bridge.
Gabe, the Leader of the Bat Pack, howls to proclaim his dominance over all he surveys!
He wowed over 5,000 students in an on-line Distance Learning event at the Texas Wildlife Association.
Their Halloween annual with our bats, called Bats-a-Billion, is their biggest online event of the year every year.
In addition to Gabe, we brought Buffy (a northern yellow bat), Zonker (an evening bat), and Buddy (a Mexican free-tailed bat).
They are all good bats!
You doin ok in your log Zonker? Just checkin, good 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.
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!
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!”
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.
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.
This bat had fallen into a back-porch bucket during all the rains last week. She managed to tread water ’till morning, when Matt & Christina found her and rescued her. We made sure her thumb claws were not damaged (luckily it was a plastic bucket), and then brought her out to the flight cage to make sure she could sustain flight. We tried a non-toxic tempura paint to ID her (it’s messy if they struggle and swat the paint brush) and you can still see a hint of red on her left ear as she is released back into the wild. Good bat, nice knowing you!
