A Batty Adventure

On a Monday morning, in the not too distant past, with sleep dust still in the corner of my eyes, I make the babies a bottle of warm milk, spoon some stinky wet canned cat food onto a dish and head out to feed our two baby kittens, Smudge and Cleo.
Our cat room has two people doors and two pet doors. One of each opens from the garage into the cat room, the other opens to the outside.
The morning sun streams through the glass of the outside door and I don’t need to turn any lights on. As I open the door into the cat room, the older kittens Rascal, Spitfire and Feisty scoot in the door with me, then it’s a kitten rodeo as I try to wrangle them and get them out of the cat room so I can feed the babies. I pick two up and toss them out. I capture the last one and as I open the door, two come in and I toss one out. The whole time I’m trying to get the older kittens out — and keep them out — the babies are crying and getting under my feet, making this job just that much harder.
Once all of the older kittens are on the other side of the door, I turn my attention to the babies.

“Good morning, good morning, good morning!” I sing-song to them.
“Mew, mew, mew, mew, mew, mew,” Smudge answers standing on my foot.
“Mew, mew, mew, mew, mew,” answers Cleo already climbing my leg.

“Where’s my babies?” I ask like they aren’t right there.
“Mew, mew, mew, mew, mew,” they both answer.
“Alright! Alright!” I say shaking the babies off. Then I tiptoe and sidestep as I try to make it to my chair without stepping on or kicking a baby. It’s amazing that two kittens can seem like ten! Every time I pick my foot up they scamper in circles looking for where mom went. And in case you don’t know it, this can be an especially tricky maneuver when you’re an old woman and your balance isn’t what it used to be!
I get to my chair and Smudge and Cleo try to climb into my lap. I set the dish of food on the floor, pick up Cleo and set her near it. She is so focused on me that she either doesn’t see me set the food down or she hasn’t yet associated the dish I carry with food, but once she gets a whiff of it she dives right in, getting her front paws on the plate and in the food.
Smudge, truly a baby, doesn’t want anything to do with soft food yet but I keep trying. I put his nose in the food, he licks it off, turns his back to the dish and cries for his bottle. And I give it to him.
Maybe if he’s really hungry he’ll eat it, I think this morning and instead of putting his nose in the food, I reach in to take a little piece from the edge of the plate. Cleo wasn’t having any of that. She pounced on me so fast! She grabbed my invading finger with her sharp little kitten claws, and bit me with her sharp little kitten teeth, growling the whole time. Lucky for me she is much too small to do any damage.
“You stinker!” I scold, but I am smiling at the same time. Protecting the food she has is an important survival skill; one I’m pleased she knows.
Smudge ate the piece of food I’d held for him and cried for more. I reached for another piece from the plate and Cleo growled and slapped my fingers. I snuck Smudge a couple of more pieces then he started to refuse them, crying for his bottle instead. I gave it to him. Cleo ate all she wanted from the dish and cried for some milk. I pulled the bottle from Smudge’s mouth and gave her some.
I try to stay and cuddle with the babies for a few minutes after they finish eating and that’s what I was doing as Mike stepped from the house and into the attached garage.
I hear a click and the light comes on.
“Peg,” he calls. “Come here. You gotta see this.”
I groan. “Don’t tell me you found more kittens!” I exclaim. Taking care of these two was enough!
“No. Come here.”
I put Cleo and Smudge down and opened the door. Three kittens run in looking for leftovers. “What?” I ask Mike as he was standing close by.
“Look,” he says.
Not knowing what I was looking for, I’m looking on the floor and into the far reaches of the garage.
“What!”
“Right there,” he says and points to a bat hanging from the pull string of the light right in front of me.
“Oh my!” I exclaim. “I’ve got to get a picture of this!” and I went for my camera. The bat had hung on the end of the string for who knows how long, two more minutes wasn’t going to make any difference.

“What are you going to do with it?” Mike asked.
“Turn it loose.”
“You need a glove.”
“I’m going to get a towel,” I said. I didn’t know where there was a glove, but I knew where there was a towel. I went into the house and grabbed a hand towel from the kitchen. Carefully I gathered the bat into it and went to work unwinding the cord. I’ll tell you what. I was so afraid of causing more damage to his wing, but it looked like in his struggle to get free, the string was deeply embedded. Gentle wasn’t working. I couldn’t see how it was wrapped. I tugged a little harder then I could see how it was twisted and the whole time this little bat was squeaking. I had to work at it a little to get it unwrapped from his thumb but I finally got it. Then I took the bat outside, opened the towel and give it a little pitch to help him get airborne. He went about two feet and landed in the grass. I’d gotten a glimpse of his outstretched wings and the one that had had the cord wrapped around it looked like it might be ripped. I quickly picked him back up with the towel. If he couldn’t fly, he would just be cat food.
  Now what? I wondered to myself. In my mind’s eye, I saw me putting him on one of the rafters of the patio. Maybe he’ll fly away when it gets dark. But if he can’t fly and he falls down, he’ll still be cat food!
Having just moved here six weeks ago, empty cardboard boxes weren’t hard to come by, at least until I can get to the recycle center. I put the towel with the bat in it into a box, opened the towel and closed the box.
Squeak, squeak, squeak, said the bat.
Angie will know what to do with him, I thought thinking of the owner of the Second Chance Wildlife Center in Tunkhannock. It’s the only place in the whole northern tier of Pennsylvania that rehabs sick or injured wildlife and she took some baby possums I found a few weeks ago.

Until Angie told me what to do with the bat, I needed to keep him safe. I set the box on the picnic table. I know from past experience with cats that they can get down into an unsealed box if they want to. I needed something to put on top of it. I looked around and there in a corner were some scraps of wood that were leftover from a project Mike had completed the day before. I picked up a couple of them and stacked them on top of the box.
That should do it.
Then I went in the house, to the computer and sent an email to Angie. “I’ve got a bat. He had a string wrapped around his wing. I wrapped him in a towel and got the string off and I let him loose, but he can’t fly. I’m afraid my cats will get him so I picked him up with the towel and put him in a box. He must have hurt himself hanging on that string from the light all night. Angie, what do I do? How do I help him? Thanks, Peg.”
“Hi Peg,” Angie replied back a few hours later. “Does anything look broken? He just may need a few days to rest. He will eat mealworms and drink from a shallow dish. I can take it if you can get it to me. Or if you want to see how he does, just keep it quiet and wear gloves when feeding.”
Well that doesn’t sound too hard. But what am I going to keep him in? In my mind’s eye I can see my dog kennels and cat carriers but the holes in those wouldn’t keep a bat in. And what if his wing is torn? I won’t know how to take care of that. Maybe I should just take him down to her.
I sent Angie another email and outlined my worries. Besides saving the life of the bat, I had another, ulterior motive. I’d really like to see what the wildlife center looks like, especially since I have it in the back of my mind that I’d love to do the same thing one day, but they do not permit visitors. Taking an injured bat to her didn’t make me a visitor, it made me a rescuer, and just maybe I’d be offered a look around.
“Give me an address for the GPS and I’ll bring it down to you tonight,” I told her.
“I am at my regular job today until 5:30,” she said and gave me an address.
I’m in! I think. I’ll get to see it. “Okay, I’ll see you after 5:30.” Then I wonder how I’m going to get Mike to go along with my scheme. Food! It always works with either one of us. “We’ll have dinner at Twigs then see you. Is that okay?” I added and sent my email off.
Mike was on the couch watching TV. “Oh honey! Do you want to go to Tunkhannock for dinner tonight?”
“I don’t know. Why?” he answers sleepily.
“We can take this bat down to Angie and have dinner while we’re there.”
“The whole way to Tunkhannock for a bat!” Mike asked incredulously. “Just give it to the cats.” But I think he was just teasing. He knows my passion for all things living, he even calls me when there’s a spider that needs relocating to the outdoors.
“NO!” Now I was incredulous. “If the cats get one on their own, then it’s fair and square and they get to keep it. But not like this. Not one that is hurt because of us.”
A ding sounded from my computer, alerting me to a new email. It was from Angie. I opened it up. “Ok as long as I can get it at 5:30 and head back to feed the critters. I have to hurry to get done by dark with all the outside ones.”
I was crestfallen. That sounded like I was meeting her at her job. I reviewed our previous emails and wondered how I could have gotten it so wrong. “I am at my regular job today until 5:30. I can give you the address here if you want to drive him out. It’s…”
Oh. The word here is a dead giveaway, it’s just that I didn’t realize she was already at her regular job. Or maybe I was reading into it what I wanted to?
“Oh. Okay. I thought I was taking him to the sanctuary but I’m dropping him at your job, right?”
“Yes, I would like to get him as I get out of work. That would work best for me. Thanks.”
I’d seen Angie’s picture on her Facebook page, but I was worried I wouldn’t recognize her in person. It rattled around in my head for the rest of the day until it was time for Mike and me to leave. Then I thought to send her an email. As my computer was hooking to the internet I remembered that I would need the address too.
Can you imagine making plans to go someplace and not taking the address with you? Well, it’s happened to me. More than once, I’m sorry to say. Only when it’s happened before I usually don’t even remember to copy the address from the internet. That means Mike has to wait for me as I connect to the internet and navigate to the website to get the address. So this time I was way ahead of the game and when Mike asks about the address I can proudly pull it from my pocket with a triumphant flourish.
I found the email that included the address, pulled a notepad in front of me and wrote the address down. Then I hit reply. “We are in a white Jeep,” I told Angie and I also included my phone number. I hit send, closed my computer, grabbed my purse and joined Mike as he sat in the Jeep waiting for me.
“Got the bat?” he asked.
“No. Didn’t you get it?” I’d have let Mike drive out of the driveway and gotten halfway to Tunkhannock before I would have remembered why we were going. Then I thought he might be teasing me but I glanced over to the picnic table and there sat the box.
“No,” he said at that same time.
I unbuckle my just fastened seatbelt and jump out. When I came back with the bat box I opened the lift gate and put him in the way back, as I call it, then I got back in the Jeep, buckled my seatbelt and we head out the driveway. We are driving down the dirt road, cross the single-lane open-grate bridge and are almost to the blacktop when Mike reaches for the GPS and asks, “Where are we going?” He was going to put the address in at the stop sign.
I gasped in horror. It flashed in my mind’s eye; the address, sitting on the table, on the notepad where I had written it, right beside my computer. “I forgot the address!”
Mike frowned, but he slowed the Jeep and turned around in the neighbors driveway.
Well that sucks, I think to myself. I’d been so proud of myself for remembering to write it down too!
Tunkhannock is about twenty-five miles from us and we left early in case we had any problems finding the address Angie gave me. We chatted as Mike drove.
“I don’t really care if we eat at Twigs or not,” Mike said. “I’m okay if we just eat at McDonalds. They have breakfast all day and I can get a sausage egg McMuffin.”
We get into Tunkhannock and not only did we have problems finding the address, we had problems finding any numbers on any of the houses or businesses. When we do finally spot one, we had gone way past where we needed to be and had to turn around and go back. I had better luck finding numbers on the mailboxes at the road, and I was finding just enough of them to keep us going until I spot a great big 230 on the front of Wisnosky Jewelers.

“There it is,” I say pointing.
“Where?”
“On the jewelry store.”
Mike parks and we get out and go inside.
“Can I help you?” a young lady asks as she approaches us.
“We’re looking for Angie,” I say.
She turns to the other lady in the store who had her back to us and I think the other lady must be Angie. The gal that greeted us looked to be barely out of her teens so I didn’t expect her to be Angie. But instead of saying, “Angie, these folks are here to see you,” as I expected her to say, she said, “There’s no Angie here.”
“Are you sure?” I asked because her glance to the other lady looked suspicious to me.
“Yeah. What do you want her for?”
“She has a wildlife rehab center and we’re supposed to meet her here. We have a bat for her.”
“No. There’s no Angie here.”
“Okay. Thanks,” and we leave.
Out in the car, Mike asks, “Now what?”
“I don’t know. She said she’d meet us here, maybe this is on her way home from work and she doesn’t want us to know where she works. She doesn’t know us and in this day and age with stalkers and wacko’s you can’t be too careful.” I understood it, but my feelings were hurt. I’m not a stalker! A wacko? Well, I do have my idiosyncrasies.
As I was thinking out loud, Mike was looking around. “Maybe she works in one of the other business.”
For the first time I take note that 230 wasn’t just a jewelry store, it was a strip mall with several other stores in it too!
“What do you want to do?” Mike asked.
I looked at the time. It was just going on five; we had half an hour to wait. “Do you want to go down to McDonalds?” Mike starts the car and we go down the street. “Do you want to get it to go?” I was afraid of being late to meet Angie.
“Nah. We’ve got plenty of time. Let’s just go in and eat.”
Mike ordered his sausage egg muffin and it was awful. The English muffin was so hard I could hear him crunching from across the table. From now on we’ll just get those at breakfast time and have our McDouble’s the rest of the time.
Mike was right; we did have plenty of time. We were back in the parking lot with five minutes to spare.
We talked about it and decided to park at the end of the one-way drive around the strip mall. If Angie was coming out, she would see us. If she was driving past, she would see us. After that there was nothing to do but wait.
Five thirty-five my phone rings. “Is this Peg?”
“Yes. Is this Angie?”
“It is. Are you here?” she asked.
“Yes we are parked at the very end of the parking lot.”
“Near Wisnosky’s?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in a minute,” and we hung up.
We watch both the road and the parking lot and we see a lady in scrubs walking towards us. “I bet that’s her,” I said to Mike, pulled the door latch and got out of the car.
“Hi Angie,” I greeted her and stuck my hand out.
“Hi,” she said and shook my hand.
“It’s nice to meet you.”
“It’s nice to meet you too,” she responded.
I took two steps back to the Jeep and opened the back gate. I pulled the box toward me and opened the lid. “There he is.”
Angie peeked in the box. “He looks healthy.”
I closed the box and introduced Mike. With pleasantries out of the way, I asked, “So what happens now?”
“I’ll check him for any broken bones, then I’ll check for white nose too. If he’s had it, I’ll be able too see the scars under a black light.”
“I didn’t know that.” However, I did know that white nose syndrome has killed a lot of bats. Five point seven million since it arrived in North America in 2006. Some colonies of bats have been completely — 100% — wiped out.
“What is white nose?” you ask.
Good question. White nose syndrome, WNS for short, is a disease caused by a fungus that invades the skin of hibernating bats. It disrupts both their hydration and hibernation cycles. The bats wake up repeatedly during the winter, burning up their limited fat reserves and have to go in search of food. Since they eat mostly night-flying insects, and there aren’t too many of those in the middle of winter, they end up dying.
“I love bats,” Angie said. “I didn’t used to, not until I started working with them. I’ve got a broken wing male in residence that will never fly again and he loves when he gets visitors.”
“Does it bother them to be relocated?” I asked. I know bats live in colonies, but I didn’t know if it would upset him to be taken to a different area.
“No, not usually.”
“How are the baby possums?”
“Great. I think they’ll be able to go out before it gets too cold. I don’t usually release any animals after Halloween but it depends on the weather.”
“Where do you turn them loose at?”
“We have a big field and woods where we live but we take them all over the place. People like to have possums around because they eat lots of mice.”
I was surprised. “Really! I didn’t know that.”
Angie gives talks on wildlife in schools and parks and anyplace she is invited and often takes her resident possum. “But she’s getting old and I’m training a new one to take her place.”
“How long do they live?” I wondered.
“Not long. Out in the wild fewer than ten percent live past the first year and most of those die before they’re two years old. Mine is three and a half and not looking good. Four is the max life span.”
“Were the babies still on the mama when Officer Kelly got them to you?” I wondered.
“Let me tell you! I smelled her long before I ever saw her. I don’t know how he ever stood the smell. ‘Let’s take the babies off,’ I told him. ‘Okay if you’re comfortable doing that,’ he said,” and here Angie laughed. “They really hold on with some good suction and you have to put your finger in to break it. Then he was going to take the dead mama back with him! ‘Oh no! I’ll just throw her out into the woods,’” she told him. “I think he was relieved he wouldn’t have to smell her anymore.”
I learned a lot in our conversation with Angie but I was conscious of keeping her too long and she had critters to feed before it got dark.
Angie promised to let me know what she finds out about the bat and the next day I got a note from her. “It’s a female bat, probably this year’s baby. Her finger is broken on the right hand/wing. That is not a bad spot for a break though.”
“Is her wing torn? Did she have white nose?” I wondered.
“No tears, no white nose. Since she is so young she was not exposed to white nose yet, I would guess. Maybe she has some immunity from her mom but that we can’t check for.”
A couple of days later I asked Angie for an update.
“She is doing very well. She loves my broken wing male bat and they are always snuggling. Thanks for getting her to me.”
Angie sent me a picture of the two bats and that got me to wondering. “Does your broken wing male have a name? How long do bats live?” I asked.

“My broken wing bat does not have a name. He was found after some careless workers knocked down a dilapidated bat box at Lacawac Sanctuary. He happened to be inside the box. They should have looked in first. His wing was broken in the process in so many places that it would never heal properly. He is so happy to have a friend, but she will be able to go back out before the bad weather sets in. They are cute together, especially when she steals his mealworms. Bats can live for 25 years. I had one come in this spring who was so old he had no teeth. He died a few weeks ago but would have died before that out in the wild.”
And thus ends A Batty Adventure. It’s been almost two weeks ago now that I found the bat and got her down to Angie at the wildlife center. But I’d like to give you an update on Smudge.
Smudge is doing much better at eating soft cat food. I had to hold the food in my fingers and keep moving it closer and closer to the food in the bowl but he’s finally eating like a big boy and I’m thinking of weaning him off the bottle this week.
The other day Mike and I were working on the house and I happen to look out the window and who do I see wandering around on the front patio all by himself? Smudge! That rascal! He had to come though the cat flap into the garage, navigate the whole way around the garage to the front and through that flap and out onto the patio. He’s such a brave little guy that I worry he’ll get himself into trouble.
Mike was passing the door to the garage and happened to look out. “Peg, come and see this,” he called.
There, on the rug outside the door was Rascal, (the yellow one) Smudge, (the little black and white one) and Spitfire, (the tabby). Rascal and Spitfire were trying to nap but Smudge couldn’t seem to get himself comfortable and eventually he saw me in the window.

And with that we will call this one done!