(no subject)

[rootofnewt]

boy rescued a bat today. we think it was an eastern red bat, but we're not sure.

he was walking down the driveway when he saw it on the ground. he thought it was dead, so he nudged it with his foot. it spread its wings and grimaced. "uh oh."

he ran back to the house and started calling vets, got an emergency vet number, called that, and they gave him the number for The Wildlife Center of Virginia. the nice lady there told him what to do. when i woke up, he showed me the bat and asked how far waynesboro was. i told him it was less than an hour, just over the mountain.

so off we went. he had the bat resting in a box (the tomcat mouse trap box, oddly enough) with paper towels for bedding. i closed the box and put it beside me in the car, under my cloak.

okay, warmth + darkness = awake bat. awake bat + box = scared bat. it started scratching. i felt horrible--i didn't want it to hurt itself (we were halfway to waynesboro), so i crooned to it and lifted the box so it was in the sun (it was still cool). the bat calmed down in the light.

the wildlife sanctuary is the only wildlife hospital in virginia. how luck that we live so close by! they took the bat and gave us a reference number. i made boy put money in their donation box, then i took his wallet and put in more.

on the way home, we wanted to stop by 20-minute cliffs, but the BR parkway was closed due to snow and ice... i could see ice and snow on the peaks of the higher mountains, but i figured the roadway would be clear right now, seeing as how it was WARM for so long.

we stopped in charlottesville at whole foods for potatoes and other things. came home, and made potato-leek-broccoli au gratin. yum.

now, i should call xiane and see if i can come visit.

i hope the little bat was only suffering from exposure (it was warm yesterday, but a COLD COLD front moved through just after dusk, so all the bugs went bye bye... i have a feeling the bat woke up, went hunting, and got hungry and tired). i hope it's not deathly ill or evil or something, but that's pretty likely, since a well bat wouldn't have collapsed on our driveway. of course, it was well enough to get pissy once it was warm.

Comments

oh goodness, this reminded me of a conversation today..

[firinel.livejournal.com]

I don't know how much of this is true. I mainly made up what I didn't know precisely to entertain her.
R: (to Marnanel) can you tell me a story?
M: what about?
R: about a boy that learns about bats
M: (stutters)
F: Hmm, there once was a boy named Tom, and he lived in the middle of nowhere with a girl named Jocelyn in the house in the middle of nowhere. One night, they were awake and he heard an odd noise. He said to Jocelyn "do you know what that noise is!" and Jocelyn said "no, do you know what that noise is?" and Tom said back "of course not, if I did i wouldn't have asked!"
So they went off around the house trying to find what the noise was, and they thought the noise was coming from the attic. they went up to the attic and what do you think they found?
R: a bat!
F: yes! It was a bat.
R: did he work with bats?
M: if he worked with bats, don't you think he'd have known what the noise was?
R: oohyeah.
F: Tom worked with computers, I think he was a programmer like Daddy. And he worked on computers in his house in the middle of nowhere with the girl named Jocelyn.
F: And ever since then he was intersted in bats, and he learned about them being nocturnal.
R:that means they sleep in the day and stay awake at night.
F: yes, and he learned that they use ecolocation to "see".
R: what's that?
M: that means they make noises and can tell how the noise bounces off of things to navigate without running into things. like, if you bounced a blal against that wall, depending on how many times it bounced back to you, or how long it took, you might be able to figure out how far away the wall was. Bats do that with noises they make.
R: ooh, that's neat!

and then Nannie said she was ready to leave so the story stopped.