Sweet Potato

The evening before Thanksgiving this year I received a call about a found bat. It had been hanging on a window perimeter for a couple of days. The people at the company were hoping it would fly away. My husband picked up the bat and upon his return home, I discovered the bat was a Red Bat. Red bats are foliage roosters, unlike Big Browns, who are crevice dwellers. Those are the types of bats we have in Wisconsin. The bats here are also all insectivorous, meaning they only eat insects.

Female crevice dwellers colonize, but no foliage roosters do. This little bat was used to being alone, but she was obviously either greatly off course, based on the season and her location, or she never figured out where she was supposed to fly. In the Fall, foliage roosters in Wisconsin generally migrate and hibernate.

I discovered the new bat was a female, so I named her Sweet Potato, in honor of Thanksgiving. She is 100% releasable. Feeding her almost 40 worms daily, by hand is tiring, at best. However, totally worth it. She and I have become buddies, but there is a sense of her returning to being wilder now, which is good. Since Thanksgiving she had never figured out how to eat alone, until the last few days. I still give her water manually, to be sure that she’s getting enough.