The pups have finally started to come out of the cave! They are 7 weeks old now, which is the age at which they normally start flying. We noticed over the past week or so that they were flying within the cave, but weren’t yet coming out at night. We think maybe the within-cave flying is for practice. Another neat thing that has occasionally been observed is a mom transferring liquid, by mouth, to her pup when the pup is about 7 weeks old. We’re not quite sure what’s going on, but we think she may be transferring liquid that contains essential enzymes to help the pup switch from a milk diet to an insect diet before it starts feeding on its own. Over the 2000-2001 breeding season, Steve Bourne, the former park manager and pretty much THE expert on Southern Bent-wing Bats, recorded over 50 hours of video of the pup creche using the infrared cameras inside the cave. Soon I will be going through all that footage to watch for behaviors like the liquid transfer so we can better understand mother-pup interactions.
Since the past several nights have been the first few times that the pups have been flying out of the cave, they are still learning how to fly and are still learning the terrain around the cave. Because of this, we have been hearing a lot more bats hitting the fence around the cave. In a normal night (before the pups started flying) we’d hear maybe five hits a night, or sometimes none. The adults are used to the fence and know how to avoid hitting it. However, over the past few nights we have heard over 20 hits per night. In addition, we have never seen an adult actually get injured from hitting the fence. Occasionally they get stunned for a few seconds, but they recover and fly off. Unfortunately, on Saturday night we heard a bat hit and then heard it flapping on the ground. It didn’t fly away after a few seconds, so I picked it up to check it. It was a pup and sure enough, it had broken its wing. The bone was sticking out of the arm and it was bleeding quite a lot. I knew the best thing to do was to put it down, as a microbat like this with a broken wing will most likely never fly again and will certainly never be able to live in the wild again. However, I’m not trained in euthanizing bats (one accepted way is by cervical dislocation, in which you basically break its neck), and I’ve never even seen it done. I didn’t want to cause the bat more suffering by botching an attempt, so we took it home and let it go into torpor in the fridge until the morning, at which point we took it to the vet. He said he could attempt to fix the wing, but I decided that putting it down would be the best option, as trying to fix it would only cause it more pain and the chances of it working were very slim. It was a tough decision and definitely one I wish I didn’t have to make, but I feel it was the best option. The vet put it down gently and we took it home (it joined the two other bats in our freezer) so Terry can take it to the South Australian Museum. At least its death can be useful to science and not a total waste.
While we were at the vet clinic, I heard lots of mewing from another room. The vet said they have some stray kittens up for adoption. Of course I had to go see them. I fell in love with a little black and white girl, who was super affectionate. Her neighbor, a spotted gray girl, was very jealous of all the attention I was giving her neighbor, so Chris petted that one. The vet had to give eye drops to the black and white one, so he let me hold her while he did it. It felt SO great to hold an animal. I realized then just how much I miss contact with pets, and how much I definitely want to have pets when I have a “real” life. Of course we couldn’t get the kittens, for many reasons (we live in a national park that doesn’t allow cats or dogs, I’m going back to the US at the end of the year, quarantine would be a hassle/maybe expensive, I don’t have a stable home location, I plan on travelling for the next several years for jobs/grad school, etc.), but if we had I would have named mine Mittens. Mittens the kitten. If only...
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