It was a lonely, unimaginably long road that brought Isis, an Egyptian fruit bat to where she belonged all along. Where it begins is unclear; her previous “owners” (a well-known amusement park) had thought she was eight years old. Isis is actually eighteen, so there’s ten years missing from her history. It’s a shame that she only found sanctuary as an elderly bat with cataracts who can’t quite hang as well as she used to. Regardless, we are so happy that she finally found peace at Bat World Sanctuary.
Isis spent most of the eight years at the amusement park with her mate. They were the only two bats at the noisy theme park. The theme park was hoping that Isis and her mate would reproduce, but their living conditions wouldn’t allow any offspring to survive. Toward the end, Isis’ mate died, so Isis lived alone in a small glass cage for several months, gawked at by large groups of people seven days a week.
Thankfully, the theme park grew tired of caring for Isis and contacted Bat World Sanctuary. The day of her arrival found Isis scared, both of the shipping ordeal she’d just endured, the strange new place, and the strange new person picking her up. She was so afraid that she would not even hang onto our hand with her feet, but we were gentle and spoke in a soft voice, and Isis finally realized that she was safe. We can’t imagine what she must have felt to enter the flight cage for the first time, to see dozens of Egyptian fruit bats just like her, cuddling together and playing with toys, and eating their fill of nutritious food every night.
Still, there was one more difficulty left for Isis to face. Soon after her arrival, Isis gave birth. Elderly Isis had apparently become pregnant before her mate died and she found herself in a new home with a newborn pup to take care of. Overwhelmed, Isis was unable to care for her baby and it fell to the padded floor of the flight cage. Her baby was found almost immediately, warmed, fed and placed into Bat World’s incubator for hand rearing.
As a few more days passed, Isis finally realized she was “home.” She became familiar with her keepers and in doing so learned to lookforward to the melon treats that always came with soft voices. A short week after giving birth, we heard Isis calling for her baby. Hoping for the best but prepared to continue hand-raising her pup, we brought Isis the pup she was seeking and carefully placed it near her on the flight cage ceiling. Isis immediately went to her baby and encouraged it to climb onto her body. Her pup began nursing just a few minutes later.
Today Isis’ baby is a few months old and well in every possible sense.
As for Isis herself, she appears very happy despite her cataracts and her arthritis. She lives a quiet, peaceful existence with friends and family all her own, and she will never be alone again.