Bat rescue!
Out of curiosity, I googled how long bats can survive without food and water and got a little bit concerned with numbers ranging from three days to a week. So I called up the wildlife centre again and they gave me the numbers of a couple bat specialists.
The first lady was extremely passionate about bats, and quite worried about it. She told me how and what to feed it if I needed to, and how to handle the bat. She said that while holding the bat, “it might show it’s teeth, but don’t be scared!” and “it might make some noises that you hear at the back of your head”.
If the bat wouldn’t take food (mealworms or viscera from a little feeding syringe which she tells me I can obtain at any pet shop) I was to try to smear some on its mouth and it’d probably lick it off “don’t worry, I’ve never had a bat bite me before!”. She also mentioned that some bats might be diseased, but if that’s the case with this bat, it would have bitten us already.
Never before have instructions made me feel that there was so much room for stuff to go horribly wrong.
But I was less wanting to feed the bat myself (without supervision) and more trying to work out how I could get the bat taken somewhere warm and safe. The lady really wanted to take him but she had two possums in her bat cage (I have that problem all the time). And while we were talking you could hear in her voice that she was trying really hard to think of whether she could possibly move the possums. But she couldn’t, so she told me to call another bat lady at an animal rehabilitation centre.
This one told me to get a box, and to use gloves to pick up the bat, place it on the cloth so it had something to hold onto, and to put it in the box and to take it to a veterinary hospital halfway between her place and mine.
I was really hoping for someone to come get the bat themselves, but it would seem that housecalls are only made for cruelty cases (or for people who call Dr Harry Cooper).
While I could just barely reach the bat myself, it was sleeping at an angle that meant I wouldn’t be able to get a proper hold on it. I had to wait for reinforcements. :P So I enlisted Jono’s help (he said it’s just like a mouse with wings after all) and he offered to drive us to the vet.
Jono had to gently pry the bat off the screen using one of my woollen gloves and put it in the box. The poor thing was chilled so badly it stiffly held its wings half open and lay on its back in the box. I put another cloth over the top of the box to cover it and hoped it hadn’t died of cold.
When we got into the car, I took a peek in the box to see if the bat was still alive, it had closed its wings a bit more so at least it was moving. Still, I wasn’t confident that it was alive yet.
But it was nice and warm in the car, and we were heading along Leach Hwy when I heard scratching noises inside the box. The bat had thawed and was still alive, yay!
We continued on our journey along Tonkin and I felt the bat moving around a bit more. Unable to claw up the smooth sides of the box, it used its wingspan to reach up and hook onto the cloth covering the box. Sensing mischief, I tried to seal the edges, but the bat found a gap and stuck its head out. And then it escaped.
So… It’s dusk, Jono’s at the wheel, Eric’s in the passenger seat and I’m sitting behind the passenger seat and there’s this 2-3 inch bat flying around learning what glass windows are. I think it deliberately skimmed our heads a few times to prove a point too. Every now and then it would land, take a look around, walk a bit, then take off again.
He’d land on us from time to time, letting us take a good look before flapping off again. Jono did very well, and added a few skill points to driving-with-bat-loose-in-car. It landed very softly each time and once, hung from his rearview mirror (way better than fluffy dice).
We tried to coax it back into the box, trying to convince it that we were actually trying to get it somewhere good and if it just let Jono drive without distraction we would get there much sooner. Just so you know, this strategy doesn’t work.
Eric started checking the map directions and finally, the bat hung onto the right rear corner of the car, still having a good look at the place, and let me put the box over it. I heard it rattling around a bit and Jono noticed that I had contained it again. But I was sitting there, belted in, with my right arm stretching across the car and holding the box up to the roof. Jono mentioned to Eric that I had contained the bat and Eric, not looking up, says “Great, keep it there” and I reply (with my arm still stretched out across the car) “You mean I have to keep my arm up here like this until we get there?”
Jono pulls over while Eric is confirming where the vet hospital is and I reach over to put my gloved hand over the box and then cover the gaps between my fingers with the cloth.
We get moving again and I start to feel the bat doing stuff in the box that involves latching onto my gloved hand, but with my hand covered with the cloth, I can’t see anything. I start giggling because whatever it’s doing tickles really really badly. Jono said he wished he was recording the whole adventure because at one point he heard me say to the bat “What are you doing to my finger?!”
Once we arrived, Jono and Eric go in to tell the vet what’s happening and Jono returns with a towel to wrap around the box so that I can extract my hand.
So now the little bat is at the vet hospital, completely thawed and probably very well fed.
Just in case you were wondering, even with the mad flapping in a moving vehicle, it’s extremely cute. And very soft. I hope the lady who picks up the bat calls me to let me know how it is. I still have to ask her what sort of bat it was.
