[nukkad] A Haven for Bats

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We cannot command nature except by obeying her.  -- Francis Bacon
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Like a lot of people, Amanda Lollar used to think bats
were scary, disgusting creatures of the night that
enjoy sucking the blood of humans.But a chance
encounter in her hometown of Mineral Wells, Texas —
home to more bats than any other state in the nation —
changed all that. And now she wants to change the way
the rest of America looks at the animals she spends
time cuddling, caressing, and calling "Sweetie Pie."
"I like them because they're the underdog," says
Lollar. "They're probably the most misunderstood
animal on the planet." 

A Haven for Bats

Ten years ago, after a sweltering day working in her
family's furniture shop, Lollar almost stepped on a
distressed bat. Her dislike of the winged creatures
was suddenly overwhelmed by sympathy for a helpless
animal "roasting alive" on the hot pavement.

She scooped it up in a newspaper to take it home to
die in her cool basement. But it didn't die.

Lollar did some reading on bats and nursed her new
friend back to health.

She eventually turned her family's furniture store
into Bat World [http://www.batworld.org], a
rehabilitation center for injured bats. She then
bought another building down the street, which she
transformed into a wild bat sanctuary, housing up to
30,000 bats on any given night. 

"I fell in love with bats and just completely went
batty," she says. 

The injured bats usually come from either her multiple
checks per day at the wild bat sanctuary — when you
have that many bats in one place, there are apt to be
some injuries — or from people who come across injured
bats, just as Lollar did years ago.

When the bats arrive at Bat World, Lollar — who has no
advanced training, but says she's learned on the job —
she determines what's wrong and then begins the often
slow process of rehabilitating them. 

For the orphan bats that she finds in abundance in the
summer (sometimes 10 or 20 per night), this can mean
feeding them with the tip of an eyelash brush. For
adults, this can mean setting a broken wing or giving
antibiotics for an infection. 

When the time comes, the animals are returned to the
wild. But sometimes injuries are so severe that
Lollar's only option is to put the bats into what she
calls permanent retirement in an indoor "flight cage."


A Day in the Life 

Lollar and her fellow bat-lovers are worried that the
bat population is steeply declining. 

Everyday, she checks on her charges, looking for
orphans or injured animals in need of special
attention, and then cares for the free and healthy
bats at her wild sanctuary. 

She holds workshops to teach others what she has
learned, gives tours to school groups and runs
programs like "Adopt-a-Bat" to raise money to pay for
the hundreds of pounds of mealworms and fruit the bats
consume every month. 

For bat-lovers and "people who have everything," she
says the "Adopt-a-Bat" program offers the opportunity
to get up-close-and-personal with a fuzzy little
creature that most people seldom even see.
Participants can even pick out which bat they wish to
adopt: Cleobatra, Rocky Batboa, or Casper (an albino),
among them.

"They're the most endangered land mammal in North
America because of human expansion," says Lollar.
"Being able to undo some of the damage we've done to
them is one of the best feelings in the world for me."
 






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