Saving Austin’s Bats

I saw my first bat when I was three years old, in the Minnesota North Woods, in a cabin in the middle of the night. I saw what looked like a flying ghost backlit by the moon through a window — skeletal phantom wings flapping around the room. I was scared to death. My parents did not know at that time that bats are wonderful animals, more than worthy of our respect and admiration and protection, but they had a little girl that was terrified, and that’s all they cared about. I just hope the bat survived — I really don’t remember.

I eventually became fascinated with bats. Bats are the only flying mammals, and they have been on this planet for over 50 million years. We’ve been around for, what, 200,000 — modern people. These guys — and apologies to Darwin — we think that they were almost perfect from the very beginning. Also, surprise: bats aren’t blind. Bats have two ways of seeing the world. They can see with their eyes, and in total darkness with their ears. And if their echolocation calls were at a decibel level that humans could hear, it would be unbearably loud, like a fire alarm. They also eat bugs — all kinds of bugs, including mosquitoes — and they save American agriculture almost $4 billion a year.

In 1990, I became a wildlife rehabilitator. Took me a minute to get around to bats, but I was at the time half of the raccoon team for Austin Wildlife Rescue. When I met my husband, Lee, I brought him over to my partner’s house, and Jerry put a big cardboard box filled with a whole bunch of little juvenile raccoons on his lap and said, “Don’t move — and above all, don’t open the box.” Well, he was a pretty good sport about it. He stuck around and eventually fell in love with raccoons and lots of other animals, including bats. And I eventually fell in love with him.

So in 2005, I got a job working for Dr. Merlin Tuttle at Bat Conservation International, as his executive assistant. I really wasn’t very good at that particular job — I wasn’t good at managing humans, it turned out — but I moved into the education department at BCI, because it turned out I was pretty good at talking to the public about bats. So that’s what I did. I got to go to all kinds of programs, always bringing little education bats — live bats — with me, to show people what they look like up close. In 2016, Lee and I started our own nonprofit, Austin Bat Refuge, and started taking over a lot of the education in town that BCI didn’t really want to do anymore — Congress Avenue Bridge, all kinds of programs for organizations and schools, all kinds of people. We like to show bats and talk about bats as individuals, because it helps to mitigate some of the kind of silly mythology and also the really damaging misinformation that is everywhere you look. If you Google bats, you get a mouthful, a handful, an earful. So it’s important to know that bats do not carry rabies, and that the vast majority of them don’t get rabies.

This is a yellow bat — these are some of our favorites. They roost in the dried skirts under palm trees. We have eastern red bats. They’re solitary most of the year, up in the trees all around our neighborhoods, but in the summer, mama bat has four pups — four pups, once a year — and we get a lot of those in at the refuge: 50 or more up on the ceiling of our flight cage last summer, waiting for their formula or their mealworm snacks. Evening bats — adorable little bats that are about the size of a cicada. They live in hollow parts of trees, and they love dead tree snags, so try to save a little dead tree snag for these guys. Tricolored bats — the smallest bat in North America, and they’re endangered; they’re a candidate for the endangered species list. They’ve had a lot of losses from white-nose syndrome. And my favorite, of course, the free-tails. There’s that mousy tail, and they have those adorably hairy toes — they use those brushes to groom themselves like cats do.

Bats are mammals. They give birth to live young. They feed their young with milk that they produce — but we sometimes have to take that over for them, because we get them in as orphans. So we take a lot of bats in every year, and sometimes we’ll get enormous loads of them. Like last February, from the W Hotel: we got a call from a pest control person who said, “I want to bring you guys 25 bats that I took out of the W Hotel.” And we said, “Sure.” So a couple hours later, he came in with 225 bats from the W Hotel. We got most of them released — after several days of feeding and rehydrating, we took them down to Congress Avenue Bridge and released them. And as far as I know, they probably went back to the W. I mean, they can fly.

Another episode was Winter Storm Uri, back in 2021. That’s our igloo — our flight cage — when we actually received about 4,000 bats. And this is not as fun of a story. They had fallen out of bridge crevices all over town, all over Central Texas, frozen. We were only able to revive about 800 of them, but we did release about 600 over time. We got a lot of gifts from our Amazon wish list — so many that we had to offload them to friends’ garages.

Okay, fun fact time. Vampire bat saliva has been synthesized into a human medicine for stroke patients. Some bats are nectar drinkers, and they happen to pollinate one of the agave plants that produces tequila — and I don’t even drink. And bats are more closely related to hoofed mammals and whales than they are to rodents or humans. Of all the threats that bats face — and they face a lot of them — we think that one of the most intractable and damaging might be human fear and ignorance. We find that showing bats up close can have a really profound effect on people. It’s impossible to stop fearing a phantom. Thank you.