Tiny Bat Rescued from Rain Gauge Gets a New Lease on Life
When Australian animal advocate Tracey Bagger received a call from Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary about a tiny animal trapped in a rain gauge, she didn’t hesitate to rush to the scene.
It all started when a child living on a remote property noticed something unusual while checking the rain gauges. Recognizing the situation, the child alerted their parents, who quickly contacted experts for help.
The rain gauge was hanging over an old farm fence, and it wasn’t hard to spot the trapped animal. “I could immediately see the dark blob at the bottom,” Bagger said.
Inside the plastic cup was a microbat.
As a trained and vaccinated microbat rehabilitator, Bagger was well-equipped to handle the bat safely. She emphasized that anyone who is not trained and vaccinated should never attempt to handle a bat, as bites and scratches can be harmful and even fatal to unvaccinated humans, and dangerous for the bats too.
Microbats are particularly prone to dehydration because of their mostly hairless bodies, so Bagger was concerned for the bat’s well-being. But when she peeked into the cup, she was surprised. “To my amazement, I saw a lively little face peering up at me with its little floofy butt wedged in the bottom of the gauge,” she recalled.
Bagger carefully removed the bat and moved him to a rehabilitation area, where she named him Houdini because of his habit of hiding in various spots within his flight pen. Houdini was identified as an adult little forest bat, one of the smallest species in Tasmania.
After three days of rehabilitation, Bagger decided that Houdini was ready to return to the wild. “Microbats are social animals, living in large family colonies,” she explained. “As such, they must be returned to the same area they were found to reunite with their family.”
Though Bagger can’t know exactly what Houdini is up to now, she often imagines him as a legend among his colony, telling the tale of his rescue and return around a bat campfire, passed down for generations.