Yesterday I had my first 'all staff meeting' at my new job where I was introduced to their version of 'hazing'. (What is it about joining groups that makes people feel the need to do that?). Anyway, it was totally innocent, all they asked me to do was to stand up in front of everyone (roughly 30 people) and tell them a 'really interesting story about myself'. Really interesting story? Shoot, which one to chose! The catch was that I had to do it on the spot and then they would either cheer or boo... and if they boo-ed I would have to tell another until they cheered. Shiza. It was 9am and I hadn't even had a chance to slam my iced latte yet. Think Lizzie, think, you don't want to get booed on your first story!! That's when it came to me. I would tell them my baby bat story. When I was in third grade my family ended up doing the oddest type of 'rescue' work that I've ever heard of. We have an old red barn on our property that is over a hundred years old and needless to say it is a haven for bats. However, one day that spring my mom had gone to grab a bail of hay out of the red barn to bring into the horse barn when she noticed a few little baby bats laying helplessly on the old wood floor of the barn. She remembered that I had just had a presentation in one of my classes about bats by a lady from the Michigan Bat Conservatory (or something like that) and she had taught us how to build bat houses. To be honest this was so long ago I can't ACTUALLY remember anything about the lady or the bat houses, but my mother recently confirmed fact. Anyway, my mom called the woman and she came over to our barn and took these little bats in a tupperware container and brought them to the bat conservatory before they would be released back into the wild. I think that was in Ionia, but again, I was like 7 so what do I know. I didn't even know where Ionia was until I was old enough to start driving to Michigan State. So the lady took the bats, my mom fed the horses the hay, and we all went along our sweet way.
Next thing we know more and more baby bats are showing up on the floor of the barn. They were so tiny that there little eye's weren't even open a lot of the time. My mom was determined to demonstrate being compassionate for animals so the my mom, and the three of us kids would go over to the barn and collect these little baby bats in tupperware containers with washclothes inside and bring them home. Every two hours we had to use a little syringe to feed them baby formula that we would heat up and test on our forearms, like you would a real baby. We weren't fooling around! Not only did we feed these little homies but they were too young (says my mom, something about that doesn't seem right though) to go to the bathroom on their own so we would have to use a (this is getting a little gross, I'm sorry) but we would have to use a warm, moist q-tip and wipe their little booties to get the 'excrement' out of them. Seriously. This is 100% true. Keep in mind, this is the story that I'm telling to 30 of my brand new colleagues.
After we would rehab these little guys we would then give them to the bat lady to bring back to her conservatory (as it so happens my boss also referred to ME as the bat lady today)! She thought that the reason so many of the babies were falling out of the rafters was because (here comes the interesting part)...apparently bats don't have a specific gestation period which means they get impregnated sometime in the fall but then they hibernate in the winter so the development process is essentially stalled ('delayed implantation') indefinitely until the weather warms up again and food will be plentiful. That particular year there had been some early warm weather (meaning the bats would have jump-started their pregnancies again) and then it got suddenly cold and we had tornado-like weather which probably resulted in a lot of dead mothers and weak children because the bugs had probably also died of in the freeze! I think its pretty incredible that bats have evolved to have such a useful adaptation. Additionally, I also learned that female bats only tend to carry one baby at a time each year but that bats tend to live to be in their thirties! Thirties! That's pretty incredible, I think. Good for us, because they eat our mosquitoes!
Anyway, that's some useless knowledge for you.
-Bat-lady (don't call me that though!)