It’s rare that we admit orphaned baby bats at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. We haven’t had any baby bats in care since 2017, but this June we admittted eight Little Brown Bats (Myotis lucifugus)!
The little furry soon to be flying mammals fell from their colony in an outbuilding on the trail to the Headwaters Preserve. First we admitted three, but soon five more came in! Feeding baby bats is skill that you can’t really learn unitl you need to do it, so it had been a while since our staff had gotten any real practice. But it turns out it is like riding a bike, except you don’t have to pedal and you don’t need a helmet!
However protective gear is still required. While very rare in bats, especially bats so young, rabies is a real concern and all staff must wear protective gloves when handling bats. This protocol protects the patient and the care provider – any bat who is able to bite a person must be sent in for rabies testing, and this can only be done on a dead bat. So we make sure not to force that outcome.
Still, rabies is very rare. We’ve treated 400 bats at HWCC in the last thirteen years – and we’ve sent dozens in for testing because they’d scratched or bitten a member of the public – only bat that we’ve sent for testing has come back positive for rabies. All the same, we take the virus very seriously and we protect ourselves from transmission.
After a few weeks in care, a few had died, but the rest began to fly! Soon it was time to release. We took them back to the Redwood surrounding the building where their colony had been so that they could rejoin their community, ready for wild freedom and shouldering their task to help rid the world of mosquitoes. Go bats go!
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