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.


14Apr2016 UTC       click at left for video

Frio & Bracken bats cover at least 40 miles in an hour in this video (link above left).  Mexican free-tailed bats are capable of flying over twice that fast in unassisted flight.  The location of both caves at the edge of the Texas Hill Country (dark grey at top) gives the bats immediate access to the agricultural fields that attract their favorite food, the corn ear-worm moth.
Could be as many as ~8 million at Bracken and ~6 at Frio, and this is just a snapshot in time, not the whole emergence!
Stuart bat cave and then Rucker emerge later at top left of video.

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