At first he did not look like a vision of Beauty but that was because he had been through so much.
Benger was found in July of 2017 as an orphan. He was almost two miles from the nearest nursery colony. He was about four weeks old and too large to have been carried by another bat in flight, so we have no idea how he got to the porch of the lady who called us. In order to get where he was found he traveled through feral cats, raccoons and skunks, fire ants, traffic and burning hot pavement. He finally ended up on a porch where he was spotted, and we were called right away.
For the first few days we honestly didn’t think Benger would survive. He was critically dehydrated, so much so that it took 5mls of fluids –more than the amount of blood contained in his tiny body- to get him up to speed.
He was also skin and bones and vomited at almost every meal, losing all the formula and precious calories his body so desperately needed. Then burns started appearing on his toes and tail membrane, likely from the scalding hot pavement he traveled across. He lost his tail to burns and eventually lost on of his thumbs and a few of his toes.
It took Benger two months to completely heal. Throughout it all, he was such a hero. Despite the pain he endured, he never lost the will to survive. He isn’t releasable because of his injuries so we will take care of him the rest of his life (15 to 20 years).
His name is a combination of Roger (don’t ask) and Benjamin Button, because he looked like a shriveled old man when he arrived. We tacked on “Avenger” because to us he is nothing short of a tiny superhero.
To celebrate his survival, Bat World volunteer Moriah Champagne made Benger a tiny cape. His cape hangs on display beside the staff lockers at Bat World Sanctuary.
An orphaned animal is at the greatest disadvantage because it has lost his or her natural mother, and a mother’s milk is very special, just as the baby to whom it gives life. Bat World Sanctuary worked for over two years with a nutritional scientist to developed a milk formula recipe that replaces free-tailed bat mother’s milk.
Free-tailed orphans are not physically able to lap milk, their tiny faces are only designed to nurse. There is no nurser small enough to accommodate their tiny mouths, so we use foam tips made from eye-shadow applicators. The foam is removed from the wand and cut into a shape that the pup will accept. Warm milk formula is dispensed, a drop at a time, onto the tip as the pup nurses. Because free-tailed pups enjoy nursing in this fashion so much, it allows us to form “assembly lines” and feed several bat pups at once.
We named the little bat Melody, and during the next few weeks Melody was hand fed twice while also being trained to eat meal worms from a dish (photo right). She thoroughly enjoyed learning and caught on in no time. Being able to self-feed gives disabled bats like Melody a sense of fulfillment, especially after suffering the devastating loss a wing and the sudden inability to catch insects in flight as nature intended.
