Going batty...

Saturday morning when I drove to the fire house to pick up N, he said “look what I have, Mom.” It was a little blond bat (LBB) with a badly broken wing that had crawled out from under one of the fire trucks and it was sitting inside his fire cap. I assume it had flow into the cavernous area, crashed into something, broken its wing. and fallen to the floor. We brought it home, put it in a tub, and then tried to figure out what to do with it. Conservation office was closed. I guess people with problems requiring help from a Conservation agent are out of luck between 5 pm Friday might and 8 am Monday morning. I was able to give the LBB some water with an eyedropper. Then I called the local vet to find out if anybody in the area would treat a bat with a broken wing. In a nutshell: nobody will treat a bat with a broken wing because the likelihood of rabies is too high. Apparently, healthy bats don’t have accidents and break their wings. Best thing to do is put the bat down and then take it to the health department, he says, oh and by the way, you can get rabies from the bat even if you don‘t get bit. All you have to do is get its saliva or blood into an open wound or your eyes or nose.” Before I could even tell R this news, R comes in “I don’t want you to touch the bat at all. I’ve just been on the CDC’s Website yadda yadda (horror story of 4-year-old girl who dies of rabies after a bat spent the night trapped in her room.) The LBB bat was dead by Sunday morning and I buried it (I would like to have its skull, so I put a stone over the spot and will check back in a few months). Fast forward to evening: The new room we added on to our house is accessed from the outside by a stairway at the back of the garage. We keep the door there open because, for the time being, the whole-house attic fan vents into the new room (R will be cutting attic vents for it shortly and covering the access into the attic). We turned the fan on at around 7 p.m. to draw in the cooling night air. I shut off the fan just before we went to bed, and went to close the door to the new room and discovered a bat swooping through the room with barely a whisper. We turned the light on in the stairwell and in a minute or so the bat swooped out into the night.