Bat Update, Blog Outreach

Photo by Tim Ryan, whose skill is undeniable, whether it's a real camera or one in a phone.

Writing from Woodward, Oklahoma, home of the second annual Lesser Prairie-chicken Festival, where my arrival with T. R. Ryan and Debby Kaspari coincided with curtains of nonstop frog-drowning rain and steadily falling temperatures. We repaired to the local Wal-mart, where you can git anything you want, from matching green rubber boots to ponchos to extra pullovers to Tickle Me Elmo flannel jammie pants to thick socks to thermal underwear to strange rubber turkeys that were in the hat section and had slits in the bottom but were probably not hats after all. We bought all of that and more because the roads are all washed out and we'll have to walk to try to see lesser prairie-chickens if we're going to see them at all. And yes, we're having a blast anyway.

Mini-update: The storm system sagged south of us, the skies cleared, we never got rained on, and I now have seen sparring lesser prairie-chickens on the lek. My Swarovski binoculars have one broken eyepiece so they're now monoculars. Must've been a fluke, because they only fell about two feet! No worries--I have my lovely Swarovski scope and all I have to do is send the binocs to the factory when I get home and they'll fix them for free.

I've gotten all my thank-you notes written, to all of you who helped me through the bat episode and helped fund my rabies pre-exposure inoculations. My mama taught me how to write 'em, and she also taught me how to hoard pretty little cards for the time when you'll need them. I've gone through quite a few pretty little notecards, the ones that bad bad Charlie didn't chew to smithereens. I've had the pleasure of corresponding with a bunch of readers who might otherwise have remained unknown to me. It's been really cool. You are an amazing bunch of people and I feel deeply blessed to share a connection with you.

As a Pretend Scientist, I'm incredibly flattered when Real Scientists read my blog and write to say so. I got an email today from one such person, a fabulous woman who sent me my first game camera, telling a story of coincidence that I thought you'd enjoy. I'm excerpting, but the gist is there:

(Our college) had spring break about when you started posting about your bats. We had a class (studying) in Belize (but) I didn't get to go along this year. When the class came back, one of the students told her dad the story about the bat that flew into their room one night. He subsequently called the Center for Disease Control who then called our county health department who then called the student health center...and the result was that 3 of 7 people who were under the roof where the bat had been (none of these people ever touched the bat) went to the emergency room and had post-exposure shots - about $2000 each. I became involved because I am our resident disease ecologist and I was asked to provide our administrators with information on rabies (hopefully in Belize).

Your posts and the link to the USGS publication were incredibly helpful. I also consulted a friend of mine who is an excellent bat biologist. What eventually happened was the health department kept calling the students and faculty who decided against the shots (even though they did not know that no one touched the bat) - these students held firm and decided not to get the shots. The whole thing was really scary...I didn't want to give them the wrong advice, but I also felt that the risk was nearly zero! So all of this rambling to say, thanks for your thoughtful posts on the bat adventures. They were extremely timely and helpful. The USGS document even included data from Belize!

The document she's referring to is "Bat Rabies and Other Lyssavirus Infections" by Denny Constantine. It's available for free, here. Thanks again to Timothy Winship for the link and the information. The ripples of outreach spread outward, ever outward. And nothing is for naught.

Nine-hundred and fifty Girl Scouts were put through post-exposure rabies vaccinations after bats were found roosting in their cabins at a retreat. Does having a bat in the same room really equate to a rabies exposure? You can't be too careful, or can you?

Makes you wonder how we all survived our childhoods. Bill of the Birds returned from Guyana, having slept in a cabin for two nights with the gentle patter of bat urine and turds raining on his mosquito netting, to the mini-drama unfolding in his own home. I slept in the same cabins two years ago. Well, I tossed and turned there. I wouldn't call it sleeping.

One person in the U.S. has died of the big brown bat rabies strain since 1958. There are indications that this strain may not be as infective or virulent to humans as others. Rabies is not transmitted by magic. You really need bat saliva containing the virus in a bite or scratch wound (which can be microscopic) or on a mucous membrane to constitute an exposure. The stories and studies alleging possible aerosol transmission of rabies in bat caves are questionable. Two spelunkers who contracted the disease in Frio Cave, Texas were wading in knee-deep guano while being collided with by clouds of bats--does that sound like aerosol transmission to you? Sounds like they got bitten or scratched to me. A horrid experiment in which opossums were caged in a teeming bat cave for several weeks resulted in several of the animals contracting rabies. Thanks to the cage wire, they couldn't make direct contact with the bats, but bat urine and effluent rained down on them, as well as live bat lice...well, hmmm. Could they have been bitten by lice that had just bitten a rabid bat? Well, yeah, you'd think so. Again--doesn't sound like aerosol transmission to me. Nor does it sound like magic. People should stay out of bat caves unless they're vaccinated and have a darn good non-recreational reason to be there, like to study and help the bats.

Research is ongoing, trying to focus down on the incubation period of rabies in bats. It appears to be rather short--generally a couple of weeks from infection to the appearance of symptoms-- and the course of the disease is quick, too. A rabid bat is dead within a week. How I wish rabies weren't in the picture where bats are concerned. Bats have more than enough bad press via folklore, and now face the most devastating epizootic perhaps in history--white nose disease--which is killing them by the hundreds of thousands in the Northeast. Bats are not out to get us. Bats are just trying to live their lives, and they desperately need friends. Now, I feel safe in being one of those friends, having finished my series of three prophylactic (pre-exposure) vaccinations. And I thank you for helping me do that.



On the evening of Sunday, April 4, Bill and I saw the first big brown bat of the season, flittering about our birding towertop. It was a fine sight. I immediately wished for a huge bat house all along the south face of the tower, wished for it to be filled with bats. I took that as a sign that my enthusiasm for bats has been tempered but not extinguished, not by a long shot. I am sadder but, thanks to my friends, much wiser.

Dee Dee is still at the Ohio Wildlife Center, where she is getting flight conditioning. She broke the straw-fine bones of her fingertips when she beat them against the glass of her super-deluxe tank. I didn't realize it had happened until I saw her swollen fingertips, and even then I didn't realize that she'd broken them.
I had hung two towels along the side for roosting, but didn't know that it's necessary to pad the glass with nonskid foam drawer liner as well, because Dee liked to crawl between the towel and the glass and that's where she did the damage to her wingtips. Now I know that. Here's how they looked soon after the injury:


You can see the bent fingertip in the lower left corner of the photo.



When I saw the swelling in her fingertips I searched online for "swollen finger bones captive bats" and got a web site that advised that Dee Dee might have a bacterial infection treatable with Clavimox. So I got some Clavimox from a friend who is a veterinarian, and gave that to her twice a day. After a week, they seemed a lot better.


When I brought her to Ohio Wildlife Center, Animal Care Director Lisa Fosco took one look at her and said, "That's not an infection. Those are fractures." She then explained how it must have happened, all for the want of some foam padding which I didn't even know Dee needed. My heart, which had already fallen through my chest when I surrendered Darryl to be tested for rabies, fell even farther. I felt I'd done everything wrong that it was possible to do wrong, all in trying to do something right.

Dee Dee's wingtips curl inward, and her wings look cupped when she flies. Lisa said Dee might still be able to fly well when the tiny bones healed and were no longer sore; she said she's seen a bat with its wingtips missing fly just fine. I got an email last week, and learned that Dee Dee (BigBrownBat #243) is making progress under the expert care of Lisa Fosco and other OWC staff and volunteers. She was flying markedly better than she did when I brought her in two weeks earlier. (They take them into a big room at night and let them fly to see how they're faring. Ooh, can I help?)

As we've seen, rehab stories don't always end well, so I am very cautiously optimistic. I have all my fingers crossed that she'll be able to fly well enough for release. I call upon you, my beloved flying blogmonkeys, to unleash the power of positive thinking and envision Dee Dee rising high and diving nimbly above the gracious old homes of Marietta, Ohio in mid-May, making her way to her maternity roost, Darryl's child safe inside her.

That's Dee in front, hiding under Darryl's leg membrane, in happier days.

What Happened Next

I'm not good for much today but burning trash and doing laundry, of which there's always a lot. A lot has happened since my last post thanking everyone who donated to the Zick Health Fund. This whole bat experience has been like riding the Wild Mouse, with sudden jags left, right and backward. I'll be honest: having it unfold publicly has been painful. There are many things I'd rather do than tell this story to thousands of people. But doing what I most long to: suddenly going offline, crawling in bed and pulling the covers over my head for oh, say a week-- isn't an option either, especially when my readers are offering up their good wishes, love and support.

So here's what happened. On February 13, I took in another bat from the same living room where Dee Dee was found. It was a male, smaller and more delicate than Dee Dee. He looked and acted healthy, except for a large swelling on the right side of his face that involved his cheek and ear and almost closed his eye. It looked like a bite, perhaps, something that isn't unexpected in a bat colony. It scabbed over and healed, but the ear was permanently damaged. In this photo, taken March 28, 2010, you can see that there's a big chunk missing from the lower border of Darryl's ear, and his tragus is shrunken to just a little nubbin in the lower ear.

In the photo below, you can appreciate his good ear. The tragus is the little fingerlike projection in the lower outer ear. The tragus and all the delicate ridges and folds of the bat ear help channel ultrasonic pulses to the inner ear where they need to go. Like all wild things, a bat must be virtually perfect in order to survive in the outdoors. That's a lesson that wildlife rehabilitators, me especially, have to learn again and again. You might recall Avis, the hand-raised eastern phoebe who didn't make it. I sure do.

I didn't find out until yesterday at the Ohio Wildlife Center that a damaged ear renders a bat, which forages and gets about using echolocation, permanently unreleasable. So hold onto that thought, bummer that it is, because it will help with what comes next.

I put Darryl in with Dee Dee and they got along great. It was so nice to know they could be together, to wait out the rest of the winter. I had visions of releasing them together. I had visions of bat children, especially when I saw the towels rocking rhythmically the first night they were together. That's bats for you. They're the sexy little beasts.

Some bats in captivity feed themselves out of dishes from the get-go, like Dee Dee.

And some, for reasons unknown, never get the hang of crawling down to their dishes for food and water. After about five days it became apparent that Darryl wasn't eating --he became torpid and unresponsive. Once I got his little engines up and running again, I tried to teach him to self-feed, with little success. He reached out and grabbed a couple of worms on his own, but he clearly preferred catered meals. We went to school, but Darryl decided not to graduate.

So I finally gave up and began feeding him by hand, something we both enjoyed. I really dug communing with Darryl every afternoon. I had to feed him before it got dark, because he got really jiggy then, being a bat and all. Uppity. Squirmy and snarly.

photo by Shila Wilson.

Bats are messy eaters. They make a lot of noise crunching down their mealworms, and mealworm heads and tails fall from their tiny jaws. They're also messy drinkers.

Because Liam loves to get in and help, and because he adored the bats, for several evenings I let him help me feed Darryl from the end of a long bent tweezers. He never touched or handled Darryl; he just fed one mealworm after another into that little mouth while I held the bat, and he was really good at it, better than I was. He could get them lined up just right and knew just when to release the tweezers.

photo by Shila Wilson

Along about St. Patrick's Day, Darryl spluttered while I was giving him water out of a dropper, and a droplet of water landed on Liam's cheek. At the time, I quizzed him sternly on where the water had gone, checked for any abrasions, began to worry, and the more I thought about it, and the more I learned about bats and viruses, the more troubled I became. Liam said that only one droplet landed on his cheek, and nothing went in his mouth or eyes (he wears glasses). We needed to be sure that none of Darryl's saliva contacted a mucous membrane. But we couldn't be sure. We could never be sure. Maybe there was a tiny droplet. And maybe Darryl was carrying rabies. And I didn't sleep much from then on. I'd look in the mirror in the bleary mornings, and I couldn't recognize myself. Even my hair was different--sticking up and out in all directions. Who is this puffy haint, staring back at me with red-rimmed eyes?

I thought that quickly getting both me and Liam pre-exposure rabies vaccinations would protect us, so I moved rapidly down that path. I asked you for help, and you responded magnificently. But that turned out to be a blind avenue. I am very grateful to virologist Tim Winship and faithful friend and veterinarian KatDoc "I hesitate to ask this, but why..." for gently helping me understand what I really needed to do. In a situation like this, friends like Tim and Kathi are beyond value. What happened to Liam constituted a potential exposure to rabies virus, so he would need post-exposure shots (much more expensive and involved than pre-exposure vaccinations) should Darryl test positive for the rabies virus. Oh, dear. Oh, no. And by the way, so would I. At that point, I was well past caring about me. I'd gotten us into this terrible mess; I deserved whatever awful thing happened. I could only think of my little boy.

I couldn't put our sweet Liam through those shots needlessly. They can be painful, and they're terribly expensive ($12,000). Problem: You can't test a live animal for rabies. You have to look at its brain tissue for the virus.

I will condense the heartache, worry and agonizing process of coming to the decision to euthanize and test Darryl so we'd know for sure if those post-exposure shots were necessary into two words: pure hell. When the Lord handed out reverence for small lives, he dumped the whole bucket into my heart. As my dad always said, "You've got your priorities backwards." Being built backward, it took me a weekend to get my priorities straightened out, and take this little animal I dearly loved to Columbus to be put down and tested for rabies.

If the bat tested negative, Liam wouldn't have to get ANY shots. If Darryl was rabies positive, well, we'd cross that bridge when we came to it, because we'd have to figure out who else might have had even a trivial exposure. Bill, Phoebe, me, Liam; others in Bill's family, all of us perhaps slated for post-exposure prophylaxis at $12,000 a pop. Can you take a chance that you didn't somehow inhale something as you were peering at the cute little bat you didn't know was rabid? Rabies is unforgiving, unequivocally fatal. I couldn't sit around with my head in my hands. I had to act, and act fast.

So on Monday, March 29 I packed up Dee Dee and Darryl and a sharp-shinned hawk who couldn't fly and drove my odd little ark to Columbus, to the Ohio Wildlife Center, to have Dee Dee and the hawk taken into their capable care. They also did me the service of putting Darryl down.

I sat in the OWC's tiny reception area for the better part of an hour, desolate, and watched through tears as a parade of citizens came through with animals and birds, to be met by kind volunteers and staff. A couple with a road-killed red-tailed hawk. Too beautiful to leave on the highway, I guess. Another couple with a fox squirrel contained in a trash can, its hind legs dragging behind it. Too sad to leave crawling about under the feeder. A nice woman with a hopeful smile and a wingless, tailless cardinal that she'd doubtless pulled out of a cat's jaws when it already constituted a meal. Too dreadful to leave to the cat to finish. A couple of raccoons bundled in towels. Who knows what their story was. I was staggered by the seemingly endless supply of sad cases and nice hopeful people, by the kindness of the OWC staff and volunteers. I was hit hard by the reality that I, with my two bats and my grounded sharp-shinned hawk, was just one of far too many desperately needing their immediate, free help.

I am so very grateful that OWC exists and cares and works around the clock to try to get some good out of all the sad carnage people, their machines and their pets visit on wild animals. They've taken in and cared for over 36,000 creatures since 1984. The Ohio Wildlife Center is 2 1/2 hours away from me, but it is my closest and only option when a creature needs surgery or I need expert advice on its care. I have leaned on them too many times.

Director of Animal Care, Lisa Fosco, looked at Darryl's ear and matter-of-factly declared that with impaired echolocation abilities, he'd be unreleasable anyway, which made me feel just a little bit better about the decision I'd had to make. She left the room and after awhile came back with a little Ziploc bag with Darryl wrapped in paper towels inside it. I filled out a possible rabies exposure report form, put it in the bag, and drove it to the Columbus Department of Health's laboratory outside Reynoldsburg. As I circled around the compound of imposing brick structures, I saw a man with a cattle car and asked him if he knew where the rabies lab might be. He opened the trailer door, revealing a dead cow, and said, "I hope this is it, because I gotta get this cow tested for rabies." Eep, eep, eep.

Cows, I understand, come down with rabies more than you'd think because when they see an animal in distress, say a bat crawling through the grass, they get curious and often sniff or lick it, getting bitten in the process. Bless their hearts.

Reeling a little from that encounter, I drove away and finally found a promising looking door. I rang the buzzer and a thin man appeared and led me, still carrying my little bag, to a lab covered with biohazard signs. The heavy steel door opened and a very large man with latex gloves, a shaved head and a black goatee nodded and took my little bag. "Got a bat there?" He told me that if all went well I'd hear from him the following afternoon. Which is today, as I'm writing this, the phone inches from my hand. I've tried, but I can't do anything else but write this and wait for the phone to ring.

And it just did. Darryl's test came back negative for rabies.

Good night, sweet leather-winged boy. I will hold my Liam all the closer for having loved you.


This afternoon, I start my pre-exposure vaccinations, because fools like me need more than angels, virologists and veterinarians to look after them.