It wasn't quite the fanfare I had hoped for, but Diggory has finally left the roost. I'd still not found any evidence that he was flying to date, but I left the greenhouse window open last night and today Diggs isn't in his roost and doesn't appear to be anywhere else in the Greenhouse according to the bat detector. Oh well. I'd kinda hoped I could have launched him into the wide open off my fingertips, and I'm going to be frantically scanning the night sky now looking for him hoping a cat didn't get him on his virgin flight but...it's for the best really which ever way he went.

Fare thee well Little Squeaking Beast, I'm going to miss you very much.

....I'm now going to enter a small period of mourning.....

Ingredients:
Une tin de Sheba tender chicken pieces
Une bottle de Whiskas kitten milk
Une tub des meal worms

Equipment:
Tweazers, scissors, a small stick

Preparation:

Taking a very small shallow dish (such as the lid off a film cannister), first spoon in approximately a gram of Sheba chicken pieces using your stick. Again using your stick (or a nice clean finger), lay these pieces out artistically around the dish. Then, carefully pour up to 5ml of Whiskas kitten milk over the chicken pieces until the dish is nearly filled.

Finally, open the tub of mealworms. Pick out one worm with your tweazers and hold it firmly close to the head. Then, taking your scissors, briskly snip the head off your mealworm, discarding this in a separate dish but cutting the rest of the (still twitching) body into short 5mm pieces. Repeat this process for up to 4 mealworms (attempting not to retch), then sprinkle the mealworm pieces over the chicken and the milk as a garnish. Serve with a dampened sponge.

It may even have been his first flight, which is what I hoped I would witness.

Basically...he'd had a miserable night last night. It was reasonably chilly and he'd got used to central heating, so when I checked him first thing this morning he was cold and sluggish and antisocial. He'd also not eaten any food.

I spent the day thinking of a solution and resolved that the following night, I'd put a heater in the greenhouse to keep the temperature up (and it looked like, thankfully, the greenhouse had warmed up enough during the day anyway to wake him up enough to take some food, because bits of meal worm were scattered liberally about when I came home).

I installed the oil powered heater in the greenhouse after I'd had my tea, and left it for a few hours to really gain temperature. Then just before bed (and after a half hour or so of watching his wild 52khz friend hunting outside) I went back to check how it was doing. By this time, the greenhouse was about blood temperature and Diggory was extremely friendly again and willing to squeak hello. He was hyperactively clambering about all over the place so I dangled some cloth around that he could climb on, then blow me, then next thing I knew he climbed to the highest point and flapped his wings and...then he was sitting on the top of the green house doors squeaking at me.

I stood stock still, wondering what he would do next. After a thorough squeak he launched off again, brushing my cheek with a wing as he skimmed past me, then piled headfirst into a large plant at which point he lost all the style points he'd accrued earlier. He forced me to bail him out, first encouraging him onto my jumper and then onto Glove (aka 'Mom') from where I could put him delicately back in his roost with most of his ego still intact.

As soon as Glove had returned him to the entrance of his little bat cave he took a few gobfuls of milk, clambered gratefully back into his safe little hidey hole, then returned to sulk mode (something I am becoming accustomed to). It was a great moment though, and my only worry now (as it always was) was if he has another attack at flying tonight and can't get back to his roost, and I have to try and locate him in some wierd and wonderful cubby hole in the greenhouse tomorrow in order to get him back to his food source.

This is where the bat detector comes it. I'm really hoping I know how to work the begger though else otherwise, Diggory is going to be more or less impossible to locate. Unless of course he becomes smart enough to return to his roost in a single night but....lets remember how he and I first met one another....

So exciting though! It's a shame he's bald, else I'd probably consider releasing him in the next day or so. He should at least grow hair before his first official outing...

I've just spent some quality time with the other creatures I'm currently residing with - namely the mealworms who are destined to be beheaded and spoonfed to my bat, the forgotten 'pets' .

You generally get them in a little tub from a pet shop. Said tub is filled with bran and a handful of mealworms, with a layer of tissue on top to keep things moist. It's basically self maintaining up to a point, but the mealworms are always excreting as they are crawling through the bran, and some of them are pupating and turning into beetles as they get older, and over time the tub of bran turns into an acrid smelling mush full of horrible white twitching things and the odd beetle. If left even longer, it would just become a bunch of beetles crawling over mounds of shit and rotting remains eating one another - a kinda post apocalyptic nightmare on a minature scale. 

This was what my tub of mealworms had nearly degenerated into, so today I finally had to face the mess and clean it up. This required picking out each mealworm that was still a mealworm and putting them aside, chucking all the beetles and pupae into a plastic bag and scooping out all the nasty smelling old feed on top of them, then wrapping all the mess in another plastic bag and hoping the beetles didn't figure a way out of the wheely bin before the bin men came. It was yucky, though as with every yucky task, the clean and fresh feeling afterwards of a well scrubbed tub of mealworms was worth every second of unpleasantness.

As a back up - I still have a tin of meaty chicken chunks cat food for days when I just can't face chopping mealworms into little chunks.

On a lighter note....here's a vampire bat on a treadmill...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdlhouEJLNY&mode=related&search=bats

I now have reliable evidence that Diggory is eating little bits of meal worm. Digusting for me, but good news for him. He takes bits back to his roost and sucks the insides out - bleugh. Also, he can now execute an elegant glide from my finger tip to a target 5 inches away and downwards. Okay it isn't much, but it's a step up from a crash landing and falling flat on his face. At an estimated age of 4 and a half weeks, that puts him right on target developmentally. I've got to get him rehabilitated in the next two weeks though, as I've got another festival. Either that, or some lucky soul somewhere is going to be babysitting a bat for a weekend...

"It's Day 26 in the Big Brother Bat House

Yesterday, Big Brother told Diggory that he could no longer live in the Big Brother house, because he was getting fat and lazy and needed to start behaving like a proper bat. Today, Elly was given the task of moving all Diggory's things to the Greenhouse. Once there, Diggory will have to start learning to fly and eat mealworms. He will not be permitted to go back in the main house, but the rest of the house mates will be allowed to visit him. Diggory and Elly are in the Greenhouse, talking..."

Okay okay, no more. But it is true, it is now 26 Days since mine and Diggory's lives collided, and I have moved the Little Squeaking Beast into the greenhouse. I did this cheifly because he's starting to smell a bit pungent. Also, I want my living room back so I can play loud films on my cinema system again without worrying about upsetting the bat.

The whole smell thing though...this, coupled with the revelation the other day that my bat seems to have a higher voice than your average pipistrelle, is all pointing again to the fact that my bat might actually be a soprano pipistrelle rather than a regular common pipistrelle. The problem is, these two species are notoriously difficult to tell apart. To illustrate, I'll quote from a scientific journal I found:-

"The two species are very similar in morphology, but recently several characters have been established that allow determination without molecular analysis. First, of course, the name-giving difference in the end-frequency of the echolocation calls can be used in the field (pipistrelle: 40-50 kHz; soprano pipistrelle: 50-60 kHz) when the sound is recorded during release. [EJ: And I'm sure now that Diggory plus the bats outside are definately more in the 50-60kHz range] In addition, a growing number of morphological characters have been found that can be used for separation of the species when an animal is held in the hand, even if not all of them are without overlap: Wing membranes, forearm and face are much darker, almost blackish in the pipistrelle, and brown in the soprano pipistrelle. [EJ: Well that's all very well if you have a couple of bats side by side to compare, mate, but I don't have that luxury] In the latter the ears always have a pale inner base. The face of the soprano pipistrelle is shorter and the forehead steeper. Unmistakable is the colour of the penis of the adult male in the two species: [EJ:  Now hang on a minute. It was hard enough to figure out that Diggory was indeed a Diggory and not a Doris back in the early days when he was young and pliable. You're not seriously asking me to try and get at his penis again now he's old and stroppy...?] the penis of the pipistrelle is grey with a slightly paler stripe in the middle; [EJ: Oh god, you really do want me to look at his penis...] the penis of the soprano pipistrelle is whitish-yellow and the base is sometimes orange [EJ: Sorry, Diggory has politely declined permission for me to use this form of identification, any other suggestions?]. Adult soprano pipistrelles have a characteristic odour resembling the smell of a noctule male [EJ: Great! And what does a noctule bat smell like then?]. Pipistrelles lack this odour. We suggest a new, promising character using the "wing venation", the pattern of the elastic fibers in the wing between the forearm and the fifth finger, a character, that had already been used for the determination of other species in the genus Pipistrellus by Vierhaus(1996): In the pipistrelle bat there is normally one "cell" between the elbow and the end of the fifth metacarpal without a crossing piece of elastic fibre; in most (> 90 %) of the soprano pipistrelles which we have examined there is a second cell without a crossing vein, and a very characteristic small "tree" of veins is visible between these two cells. [EJ: (pauses to read last portion a couple of times) Okay I think I er... (rereads it again) Nope...nope I'm sorry I don't understand that. What do you mean by 'finger' in the context of a bat? What do you mean by cell? What's the fifth metacarpal? Oh...bluddy hell. ]

I'm going to have to try and work this out though because sopranos are a lot rarer than common pipistrelles and if mine is a soprano, a bat protection service needs to know about my local colony as I suspect the old building they are living in is due to be sold off and knocked down soon. I reckon it'll all be a lot easier when Diggory gets his adult fur (he's still bald at the moment) as sopranos have a relatively distinctive light orange brown and commons are a lot darker. Until then though, the mystery remains. Rare or not, he smells so into the greenhouse he goes. I've moved his old roost as-is (with him still in it, asleep) so theoretically he shouldn't be too traumatised, he'll simply wake up, have a quick ecolocate, and realise that his residence has somehow magically got 5 times bigger. He even gets to keep his heated mat for the night time, and knowing me I'll probably be over there at supper with a hot water bottle and a nice hot drink. This bat is never gonna leave me is it? Never.

Ah har. I've got to the root of the 'My bat detector doesn't work' problem - it was tuned wrong. I was tuned to 45khz because that was what I was told a Pipistrelle squeaks at. Tonight however (the first night for ages where it hasn't rained) I went out in the garden and wiggled the dial around, and finally got a bunch of squeaks at over 50khz. I spent half an hour watching a bat wheel around hunting whilst drinking coffee, then went back inside and pointed the detector at my bat and sure enough, it was squeaking at the same frequency.

Now I have to work out whether I just have a common pipistrelle with a very high voice, or a soprano pipistrelle with a very low one. Work ongoing. 

Incidentally 'Pipistrelle' is Latin for 'little squeaking beast'. Nice.

Okay okay, I know. It's nothing to be ashamed of, it can happen to anyone. I'm trying not to make my bat paranoid about it.

Initially fearful that it might be some sort of fatal bat mange or scrofula, I did another google search and I *think* my bat is simply shedding its baby fur and growing its adult coat. It's still a troubling sight though, after all this time and effort I have invested in keeping the little begger alive.

Anyone know a good wig maker for bats..? Or perhaps we can cover it up with a little bat comb-over and a nice toupee...

Everyone is going stir crazy in Manchester. I think it’s been raining continuously for about 3 weeks now and everyone is going quietly mad. I think it would have helped if there had even been one day in the middle of it all where it had been sunny – no, just if it hadn’t rained – but there hasn’t. I’m not quite sure how much longer I can last before I *scream*.

 

Anyhoo, when it rains, the traffic always gets worse. We suddenly get lane-hoggers crawling along the fast lane at 40 as though it’s doing people a public service. We get a higher volume of cars because all the mothers decide their little darlings will melt in the wet weather and need a lift to school, even if its only a few hundred foot away from the house. And then of course we get the lunatics that reckon aiming obliquely at a large puddle at +80mph isn’t going cause one set of wheels to aquaplane while the other set of wheels will not, or that its only rain and therefore they don't need to take extra care when tail gating/under taking or squeezing into gaps, and these are the people who are usually causing the almost daily 30 min delays and lane closures because there has been a huge accident on such and such motorway.

 

It’s wearing. There was the worse gridlock so far last evening where (which our office is on the 5^th floor and we can look down over the science park) you could see all the roads for miles around jammed with angry car drivers honking at one another – I think this may have been due to floods. It took me nearly an hour to get to a garden centre that was only 10 mins away normally and I was furious by the time I got there. In fact, I have been a great big steaming ball of fury for about a week now and I think it's a least partly due to this endless grotty weather.

 

But at least I got a good bat box. Diggory doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going into the greenhouse this weekend. I’m going to miss the little begger fiercely but he needs space to stretch his wings and practise his flying and he’s not going to get that in his present residence.

 

I managed to tempt him to have a little go at flying last night too, as it happens. I persuaded him onto Glove, then held him as high as I could in his little tent residence and let instinct take over. Sure enough, he dangled himself from my fingertip and had a little echo locate around, then started whizzing his little wings as fast as he could and let go. Splat, he went, right onto the floor. Luckily it was a few inches so he wasn’t even dazed, and I scooped him up quickly for another crack at it.

 

Off he went again, dangling, echo locating, revving the wings up like a mini airoplane, launch and….splat. At that point he started to get fractious so I put him back on his roost and he curled up in his favourite cubby in the cloth next to the heated mat and sulked for the rest of the night.

 

So as you see…he’s ready mentally to start flying and I just need to give him the proper space. I reckon I’m going to rig a bat box in a dark(ish) corner (still with heated mat…Diggory’s such a lucky bat) and put some very fine mesh over the window and door, and then leave him to it. I’ll make sure his dropping point is well padded for a while until I’ve established he’s finally got the gist of it, and then all he has to do is prove to me he can corner, accelerate, signal and manoeuvre and I’ll leave the window open and let him go. He might also eat all the bugs who are living on my tomatoes.

 

One thing has been pointed out though. “Won’t all the glass in the greenhouse confuse him and he’ll fly around bashing himself to death against the windows?” asked someone. I thought about this for a while and I reckon he’s going to be ok because remember…a bat navigates via echo location so to him, a window is an opaque wall. At least that’s the theory anyhow and I’m going to have to watch him very carefully for a bit (hence the trial over the weekend). The other problem is going to be the light, so I may have to box off a special area in t’greenhouse especially for him that’s nice and dark and secure.

 

Ack well. I’ll keep you posted anyhow. Let’s hope it all goes ok, eh?

Diggory posed for a little photoshoot today (all added to his photo album)

Personal favourites:-

This is a lovely shot of his wings in motion. You can see the arcing sweep it makes. Diggory is getting more and more fast moving and its getting harder to capture him these days.

A really nice look at a wing. Incidentally it might look like I'm pinning him down there but I'm not, he stretched and posed his wings of his own accord there.

His nose appears to be changing shape and getting more bulgy. I wonder if this is necessary for his echo location skills? He also seems to be getting a great deal more fluffy. One test to see if you have a baby bat or an adult bat is to gently blow on its fur, and if it parts, its likely an adult. Diggory's fur is getting close to this stage now.

I also finally got a nice none blurry movie of him, but its huge and as yet, YouTube spits it out. Until I figure out how to compress it, and assuming you have broadband and don't mind downloading 100MB - here's the unedited movie. Its very clear...you see him yawn and his little tongue and teeth as well as the obligatory cleaning and wing flapping.

Latest vid.

Diggory's conversion from fat pampered house bat to wild 1 inch long killing machine continues.

To date, Diggory's whole live has been seriously based on the horizontal, and I was beginning to suspect that this may be affecting his willingness to learn to fly. The key element was the heated mat. I had recently rigged a nice little climbing tower for him, but while the heated mat was still flat on the ground, this was where he was going to spend his time splayed out and basking, and I needed to address this.

Today, I completely overhauled the Diggory Residence - changing the design from Horizontal Roost to Vertical Roost thus:

what we see here is one Vivarium heating mat, selotaped to the inside of a cornflake box and covered with an old headscarf that has skulls and cross bones all over it (seemed appropriate...). This is finished off with a bit of bamboo matting, loosely attached to the cornflake box with a strip of cardboard. Bingo, one Roost Deluxe (tm) based on flowing Vertical Themes with luxurious under roost heating. Every bat residence should have one.

This has...as you can see from the picture, sucessfully persuaded Diggory off the ground and into a much more convincing 'dangle upside down' bat-esque style of sleeping. This may serve to poke subliminally at his innate instincts and remind him that he should be hunting down crunchy insects in the cold night air and not lying on a dish cloth eating kitten milk all day.

For a while, I thought it had all back fired on me totally. His food dish was still left on the floor but it took Diggory quite a while to figure out that he actually had to leave his new roost and go on a little trek downwards to take lunch (in the old Horizontal Roost set up he could just stick his head out from under his bamboo matting and find his food dish right there next to him). He sussed it eventually though, and we're both happy that Phase 2 of his rehibilitation has gone off without any serious problems.

As to flying though...periodically he's still willing to sit in my hand and when he does, I always upturn it and let him dangle to see if this will trigger any hard wired flying instincts. It has got him jiggling his wings a lot and echo locating all around him, but he still doesn't seem willing to make that final step and leap off. The temptation at that point is to shake him off my hand violently, but I haven't done this to date just in case he really isn't ready to fly yet and goes splat onto my hard laminate covered floor.

I'm prepared to be patient. It would also be nice to witness Diggory's first flight, but I would be just has happy to unzip his tent one day and find him dangling from the ceiling. Either way, I'll give it a couple more weeks, but then I may have to resort to something more drastic like twanging him from an elastic band or chucking him from an upstairs window. Either that, or I'm going to be stuck with a pet bat for the next 16 years (yes they *can* live that long).

 

E.K Jelly's Bat Sanctuary was open for more visitors today, namely my Mum who was en route to my Granny's in Lincolnshire but had stopped by my place to see if it was really true that I had a pet bat.

Just like everyone else, she was fascinated. Diggory is a lot more skittish these days though, so it was a bit more tricky holding him in my hand to display him. He reacts quite nervously to sudden sounds and movements, thus having my Mum flailing around in the background shrieking and waving her arms about was bound to freak him out. Hell, it freaks me half the time.

In the end though, I managed to calm him down suffiently for Mum to get a good look at him, and even see him fed off a paint brush. But she did think I was taking it too far not letting her use the television downstairs to watch Eastenders because it might upset the bat. Hey...this bat rearing thing requires commitment and sacrifice, she needs to appreciate this.

She did know there wouldn't be any food in my fridge though, so she actually resorted to bringing a lump of fillet steak and some salad/tomatos in her case all the way from the Isle of Man to shame me. I was quite frankly dazzled that the lump of steak wasn't confiscated at the airport - I mean, what on earth would a large lump of raw meat look like in the x-ray machine? Wasn't smuggling producing in and out of the Isle of Man illegal? Does this mean you could feasibly sneak bits of body out of a country in a suitcase and no-one would stop you? Good god, is all I can say.

Mum fried the steak with a couple of spring onions and chives from the garden plus creme freche, garnished the tomatoes with freshly killed basil from the greenhouse, and we served it with home grown spuds (not mine, but traded for a bat viewing a while back). All of this seriously impressed her, and afterwards I walked her around my garden and talked her through all my plants. The last time she saw my garden it was winter time and most things weren't out yet. Now all my vines were leafy and my herbs were covered in shiny new growth, and I even had some flowers - she was most impressed. It seemed that Granddad's cottage gardener gene is alive and well and living in me, which is heartening.

I also showed her the first blossoming of my inner hippy - aka my purple dyed jeans. Muther used to use Dylon when it meant being up to your elbows in cold water dye, getting it everywhere and everything coming out all stripy. She was most impressed by the results of the new 40 degree washing machine dyes and I think I may have set her off again. Indeed, I still have a whole bunch of stuff I need to die Turquiose, Canary Yellow, Violet and Black but I haven't yet had any time to do it. Must do all that before the next festival or yet again I'm going to be the most boring hippy in the campsite.

We hung around chatting until quite late, then I kissed the Bat goodnight and tucked it in, and pointed Muther to her room and gave her a towel.

Tomorrow....Mum attempts to cross the country despite floods all over the place, and I'm going to see a Preview of Monkey - the Musical. How exciting.

(also see Diggory's Photo Album)

(also see Diggory's photo album)

 

I have to admit, part of the reason I undertook this bat rearing was the challenge. All the websites said things like ‘this must be done by a professional’, ‘must not be undertaken by inexperienced but well meaning people’ etc. I knew my stuff though. I’d kept every flavour of pet rodent imaginable as a kid (plus a few other challenging animals like tarantula) and been on lengthy mammal recognition courses including capture and surveying. Supplement this with a reasonably biology biased education and you can see that I’m not just your average well meaning Joe.

 

I think the fact that Diggory is in such fine fettle now has proved my point. I do have to admit to one area where I am a little stumped though – flying. According to th’internet, Diggory should at least be trying to fly by now, but all he does is sit on his ass all day preening himself, and stuffing his face with cat food. Not that anything one inch long and weighing only a couple of grams could ever be obese…but there is a small chance that he’s getting fat. The world’s only bat with love handles.

 

Anyhoo. He needs to get flying somehow to burn those calories and I can’t figure out how to encourage him, being a strictly land based organism myself. I guess I could just chuck him out of a window and hope. Or perhaps tie some string to his leg and wheel him around my head a few times until he gets the idea. I suspect the key here though is to rehash his ‘roost’ somehow. There isn’t very much information about this but I found one clue in a bat rearing website which states that bat take-off requires room to drop and swoop. This would explain why all bat houses sold in garden centres (yes…I went round all the garden centres studying bat house to pick up tips) are very much styled around the vertical, with a narrow upright slot for the bat to wedge itself into to sleep, and a little landing pad at the bottom from which the bat hurls itself into the ether.

 

Diggory’s residence is very much styled around the horizontal– the hub of which is the heated mat upon which he sprawls himself so gaily. I think I need to figure out a way of turning this all by 90 degrees and elevating it somehow – with a little trampoline at the bottom of it obviously, I don’t want him injured unnecessarily. I added a tower covered in dishcloth the other night to see if he’d climb up that but he ignored it, and I think now I need to angle the heated mat itself to encourage him to dangle rather than sprawl.

 

Plans ongoing…my tiny little mind is whirring with cunning ploys. Who needs Mecano and chemistry sets to promote creative thought – just get every kid a bat.

Like a proud parent, I'm videoing my baby's every moves and boring other people with them....

Bat #2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQx-o0tuKg8

Bat #3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP_oaKAJjI8

Bat #4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL8g2ILbC9I

Bat #5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeE75bJFKeg

 

Okay it had to happen...my first You Tube vid of the bat...

 

(also see Diggory's Photo Album)

Oh dear, my Diggory is growing up. He doesn't want to sit in my hand anymore, I caught him sneakily munching on solid food today (catfood not mealworms though - thank *god*) and I'm really in his bad books now because I tried to give him a bath - that didn't go down well AT ALL.

The cat food thing is a real breakthrough though. Crushing mealworms was just too horrible for words, but I soaked cat food in Diggory's favourite food Whiskas kitten milk and I caught him digging his face deep in the milk to grab off little hunks. This is far less traumatic than chopping up live worms so I can save this now til he gets his teeth and the final parts of his adult personality start coming through. Oh yes, and...8 out of 10 bats prefer Whiskas - Diggory spat out Felix Milk and started to get thin.

Still waiting for the first signs that he's trying to fly though. Nothing yet but…I know its going to be a shock when he finally does.

(also see Diggory's Photo Album)

No major bat related incidents to report. As Diggory has become considerably more active recently I’m moved him to slightly more spacious accommodation – namely a tent inner suspended from two poles hung between my sofa and a radiator. The idea is that this should give him plenty of room when he finally takes his first flap. I also installed a heated seat tray in there, and though I worried at first that it would be too hot for him, he now lies sprawled against it, his little wings outstretched, basking. He looks like a tiny weeny little hairy (winged) German sunbather.

He’s getting quite smart for something 1 inch long as well. He can hear when I’m moving about and he starts shuffling about and squeaking to get my attention (for some reason, I can hear bat squeaks, just as I can hear those cat scarer things and dog whistles). He especially recognises the sound of the zips on the tent door, and he acknowledges Glove as his mother and Dry Brush as some sort of playmate/brother and is sent into little apoplexies of glee whenever he is tickled by it.

I creep around first thing in the morning to try and avoid waking him up (it never works), then pop back at lunchtime to top up his stomach, and creep around again when I get home from work (which also doesn't work and he spots my arrival every time). Having a bat is very similar to having a very demanding small dog actually, except in the evenings it doesn't curl up on your lap, but instead in a teeny weeny little nook in the palm of your hand. And you can only stroke it with the tip of a very fine brush.

When Diggory finally grows up and leaves home I'm going to be lost without him...

(also see Diggory's Photo Album)

 

The E. K. Jelly Bat Sanctuary opened its doors to visitors today and I showcased Diggory to a few other people. He did his ‘tricks’ (i.e. waking up and eating) and everyone seemed just as amazed as me at how tiny he was. And he is tiny, it’s almost unreal that a warm blooded living creature can be so small. That said, I believe my bat is probably about more or less adult sized now – that’s to say, I’ve been doing my research and all the pipistrelle pictures I can find picture a creature sat on the end of someone’s thumb, about an inch long, and this is more or less the size of Diggory though he is less furred.

 

Also today, his eyes opened which I *think* means he’s about 9-10 days old (ergo, I only have a week and a half more of this before he’s grown up enough to be released). Despite the fact his eyes have opened, he still hasn’t twigged that Mommy is 80 stories high and that this might be a little strange. That said, I guess if he hasn’t figured out he’s adopted by now, I guess I shouldn’t shatter his illusions unless I really have to. He may start noticing something funny when he goes to primary school though, and all the other kids are 2 foot tall and like eating burgers and sweets whilst he’s a inch long hairy mammal with a fondness for mealworms.

 

Hm. Mealworms. I’m told that when bats reach the 2-3 week level, you have to start weening them onto mealworms so I went to my local petstore and got some live mealworms from their reptile section and brought them home in a plastic container.

 

Mealworms are horrible creatures. They eventually pupate and turn into beetles, but whilst they are worms they are carnivorous, eating each other, flesh, and live baby bats if you’re daft enough to leave a dish of them in a bat cage and the baby falls in.

 

Apparently what I have to do is start crushing mealworms into milk. Unfortunatly the worms are covered in a hard shell that is difficult to squish, and when you do squish them, the guts are vomit renchingly unpleasant. I certainly felt sick when I finally plucked up the nerves to crush one, and I didn’t blame Diggory when he turned up his nose either. I’ll keep hedging my bets and offering him cat food as well as meal worms when he gets a little older, hoping that he takes the cat food and releases me of worm crushing duties. Otherwise….Diggory’s teenaged phase is going to be most unpleasant, and not just because he listens to loud music and refuses to tidy his room….

(also see Diggory's Photo Album)

 

Me and the Bat have got ourselves sorted out now. I carry him around in the palm of my hand all day. When he wants a feed he wakes up and squeaks at me, and I obediently give him a couple of brushfuls of Kitten milk. When he’s done, he arches his back in disgust at the brush and I let him snuggle back up between my fingers to sleep until the next bout of activity. Occasionally he sits around grooming himself and stretching his wings, and sometimes I tickle him with a dry brush which sends him into an ecstatic fervour – it’s almost kinky. It’s a funny old relationship but it seems to work.

 

This was my Friday. Basically, I just wanted to build the bat up and help him recover from the crap few days he’d had previously. This meant cramming milk down his maw every time him woke up, and generally making him feel special and loved by letting him stay close to body warm and a heart beat.

 

Luckily, so far the sweet little guy has been polite enough to drink more or less everything I have offered to him (as well as liberally pooing it all over me afterwards as well…hey ho). This tactic seems to be working too, he seems to be coming along in leaps and bounds. Given the fact I rescued a bat that was basically miserable, floppy and useless, I now have a bat that is doing little push ups on its thumbs and having manic moments where he crawls around all over the place squeaking until his whole body trembles. He’s stretching and cleaning his wings like he’s limbering up for the big day when he takes his first flap, and he basically looks like a bat that has no idea he’s adopted, even though Mommy is 1000 times bigger than he is.

 

I’m beginning to think I have a knack for this thing, though “Sorry I’m going to work from home today, I have to look after my bat” is probably the most surreal excuse I have ever used…everyone is agreeing this is pretty weird, even for me. Once in a lifetime opportunity though eh? I mean, how often does Britain’s smallest mammal just fall into your lap and beg to be ticked with a dry paint brush. Not often, I can tell you that…

(also see Diggory's Photo Album)

As mentioned in the previous entry, I'm stuck with a baby bat. After an initial evening's confusion, I diligently followed the instructions from all the Bat Society websites and stuck my bat on a cloth in a plant pot on my windowsill, then left it out over night in the hope that Mommy would come and save it.

Only one of two things could happen, I thought. Alternative One, I would check the plant pot the next morning and find it empty, leaving me to believe Mommy did indeed rescue it (deliberately ignoring the more likely explanation that a cat got it). Alternative Two, I would check the plant pot the next morning and find a corpse, which would be very sad but at least I could have felt I did what I could.

There was a third alternative though. I woke up the next morning and checked the plant pot and the bat was, indeed, still there. It was very rainy and cold and the bat had born the brunt of the weather and when I first poked the wet, limp form nothing happened. I thought 'Oh dear - alternative two' and started to make funeral preparations. When I poked it again though, it started moving very slowly and weakly. Welcome to Alternative three.

This third alternative was actually the most inconvenient because me being me, I couldn't now abandon it if it had suffered so long and so stoically already. The fact that it had had the sheer grit to survive a really shitty night alone thus committed me to helping it survive by hook or by crook, come what may, and I think it realised this as it squoke pitifully at me from that damp plant pot in the rain. We were in this together now, until the bitter end. I had become *responsible* for it.

What could I do though?  I guess I had to consider driving the thing down to the RSCPA or local vet or similar. I'd feel a bit silly but bats are a protected species so perhaps they'd not mock me too much. Who to go to though? Web searches weren't really helpful.

In the end, I gave it fresh bedding and left it in the greenhouse where it could warm up and dry off. Then, when I got to work I rang the National Bat Helpline who told me I was doing everything right so far, and who gave me the number of my local Bat Society who could link me up to a 'Professional Bat Carer' who would take the thing of my hands and finally free me of all guilt. I rang this number but there was no reply so I left a message. Then I started worrying.

I worried, chiefly, that I was going to have to invite some hairy socks-and-sandals wearing nutter bat enthusiast to my home to collect a bat, only to find out when they arrived that the thing had snuffed it. This bugged me so much that in the end I had to drive home at lunch time to check on it, and even though I was still expecting to find a corpse, it had actually dried off and seemed much more cheerful. It even greeted me with a few brave little clicks, and lapped a little bit of water off the end of a moistened rag.

Overjoyed, I vowed there and then that I would take care of it, even if my local Bat Society abandoned me. Which is just as well as the Bat Society people never rang me back...

At the end of the day (three Bat Soc. calls later) I knew that Bat Jnr couldn't have eaten for at least two days so it was time to take emergency steps. I swung by Sainsburys and got some Whiskas cat milk, then hand fed it to the poor floppy creature using a small paint brush, taking all necessary steps to avoid rabies in the process.

I'd done a bit of research and my guess was that it was a baby pipistrelle bat. The pipistrelle have apparently recently been divided into two species - the 45hz squeakers and the 55hz squeakers and by strange coincidence I had a bat detector (a present from a guy I was dating...some women get flowers and chocolates, I get bat detectors, don't ask...) and was able to verify that I have a 45hz bat - they should come with little stickers on them like those radio controlled cars. Whatever it was though, it was extremely gratifying to have such a tiny helpless creature take food off me and then cuddle up into my fingers for a nap.

Me and Diggory had bonded, there was no going back. Once I established that he was prepared to eat Kitten Milk, it became my mission to fatten him up as quickly as possible and help him recover the trauma of a dreadful night in the rain. This meant my sitting all evening with a small bat curled in the palm of my left hand, it periodically waking up and clicking at me, and me obediently responding by giving it a few brushfuls of milk. At night, I bedded it down in a nice warm cardboard box in the airing cupboard, and Diggory contentedly hung himself upside down on a sponge and fell asleep.

Dunno what I'm going to do about work tomorrow. "I'll be working from home today because I'm nursing a baby bat". Even for me...this is probably a bit too surreal...