They Called Me "The Bat Lady"

Back home I was referred to as "The Bat Lady", cause I was often seen with baby bats hanging from my shirt as I worked at the library. (Real professional eh?!) No one had a problem with it, including my bosses. It was a small town, we had about 50,000 volumes. A nice sized library for a fairly small town. I worked with alot of kids, and the library had a pet friendly policy. We had birds, lizards and fish...the patrons really loved them!

Now where the bat thing started was back in the 90s, there was some smoke damage at Alabaster Caverns, near Freedom Oklahoma, and the bats cleared out of the caves for a few years. During the time they were displaced, some were living in the grain elevator nearby our house. Well this wasn't suitable when the temperatures got to be over 100 degrees. The mother bats would loose consciousness and fall to the ground with the babies hanging on. The neighborhood cats would race in to eat the bats, which made us sick to our stomach! Sometimes the bats wouldn't die from the fall and would shriek and cry for their babies who also had fell. The babies were usually knocked out cold, while the mothers got ate. Then when the temps would drop at night, the babies would shriek for their mothers which wouldn't come. It was a very disturbing thing for me and my son to witness, so we did something about it.

First off we had to learn alot about bats, we got rubber gloves, and a big old cage we had. We scared the cats off by being there alot, and they came less and less (as we cleaned up the dead bats too). The bats would be unconscious as we gathered them (Usually gathering about 5 healthy looking ones, and 7 or 8 babies). We would rehydrate them by spraying them with water, we bottle fed the babies a bit to get some moisture in them. Then we'd put them in my dark garage with a fan and left them alone for about 6 hours. By then, the momma's were wide awake and very protective over the babies, some of the babies had found their mommas in the cage, this was what we wanted, and this was our goal. It wasn't to raise bats, but we tried once.

There was one baby, no bigger than a 50 cent piece, I named it "Batty", I shouldn't have ever named it, but this was when we first started doing this. Batty would shriek and cry, and crawl over to me when I came near the cage....Id hold him and try to teach him to hang by his wings... he was more of a crawler though. I had to bottle feed him every few hours...so I had to take him to work with me. (We all brought animals to work with us at some point)... it was a cool library!!!

I found a woman on the internet in Australia who ran a bat rescue mission, and gave her a call. She informed me that the babies had no chance of survival without the mothers. I COULD bottle feed and keep it alive, but it would never know a roosting place, never really know how to hunt, etc... So it was a dilemma, considering she told me the bats had a life expectancy of 15-20 years. Did I really want a bat for a pet for 20 years? Yes! I was willing to do it...but unfortunately Batty's maker had different plans for him in heaven. (If their is a heaven for bats). Neither my son or I was ever bitten, of course we were careful with the adults...this gave my son an open mind where animals are concerned.

Well I've babbled enough about bats, they are very misunderstood, eating 2000 mosquitos in one night...I think we all owe them a big thanks for that.

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