Each year mother red bats (Lasiurus borealis) and their pups, as well as many orphaned red bat pups, arrive at the Austin Bat Hospital. Barbara cares for these bats, releasing mothers and their young once they are rehydrated and their injuries healed. Orphaned young are given supplemental feedings until they become proficient at feeding on flying insects in a large flight cage. Insects taken by young at the facility have been identified through examination of feces. Dr. John Whitaker at the University of Indiana in Terra Haute identified both available insect prey, and insects found in droppings of the young collected by Barbara. Results indicate that orphans feed selectively, and feed on insects that are common prey taken by red bats in the wild. This study also demonstrates that the ability of young red bats to feed on flying insects is innate.
During the summer of 2004, Erin Gillam, a graduate student of Dr. Gary McCracken
at the University of Tennessee, Knoxsville, assisted in the collection of tiny tissue samples from red bat mothers and pups at the facility. DNA work will be done to determine paternity, i.e., do young in a single liter have the same or different fathers.
Barbara finds that young red bats use social calls to interact with one another and their mother. In the spring of 2005, Dr. Brock Fenton at the University of Western Ontario in Canada will be sending a graduate student to record and analyze these calls.
Pictured below is Jesse Barber in Ecuador. Jesse is a graduate student at the Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His professor is entomologist, Bill Conner.
Jesse learned red bat care at The Bat Lab in Austin where he also recorded some
of their calls. The red bat shown on the left was “Jackie”, Jesse's favorite red bat
orphan.
