What Happened Next

I'm not good for much today but burning trash and doing laundry, of which there's always a lot. A lot has happened since my last post thanking everyone who donated to the Zick Health Fund. This whole bat experience has been like riding the Wild Mouse, with sudden jags left, right and backward. I'll be honest: having it unfold publicly has been painful. There are many things I'd rather do than tell this story to thousands of people. But doing what I most long to: suddenly going offline, crawling in bed and pulling the covers over my head for oh, say a week-- isn't an option either, especially when my readers are offering up their good wishes, love and support.

So here's what happened. On February 13, I took in another bat from the same living room where Dee Dee was found. It was a male, smaller and more delicate than Dee Dee. He looked and acted healthy, except for a large swelling on the right side of his face that involved his cheek and ear and almost closed his eye. It looked like a bite, perhaps, something that isn't unexpected in a bat colony. It scabbed over and healed, but the ear was permanently damaged. In this photo, taken March 28, 2010, you can see that there's a big chunk missing from the lower border of Darryl's ear, and his tragus is shrunken to just a little nubbin in the lower ear.

In the photo below, you can appreciate his good ear. The tragus is the little fingerlike projection in the lower outer ear. The tragus and all the delicate ridges and folds of the bat ear help channel ultrasonic pulses to the inner ear where they need to go. Like all wild things, a bat must be virtually perfect in order to survive in the outdoors. That's a lesson that wildlife rehabilitators, me especially, have to learn again and again. You might recall Avis, the hand-raised eastern phoebe who didn't make it. I sure do.

I didn't find out until yesterday at the Ohio Wildlife Center that a damaged ear renders a bat, which forages and gets about using echolocation, permanently unreleasable. So hold onto that thought, bummer that it is, because it will help with what comes next.

I put Darryl in with Dee Dee and they got along great. It was so nice to know they could be together, to wait out the rest of the winter. I had visions of releasing them together. I had visions of bat children, especially when I saw the towels rocking rhythmically the first night they were together. That's bats for you. They're the sexy little beasts.

Some bats in captivity feed themselves out of dishes from the get-go, like Dee Dee.

And some, for reasons unknown, never get the hang of crawling down to their dishes for food and water. After about five days it became apparent that Darryl wasn't eating --he became torpid and unresponsive. Once I got his little engines up and running again, I tried to teach him to self-feed, with little success. He reached out and grabbed a couple of worms on his own, but he clearly preferred catered meals. We went to school, but Darryl decided not to graduate.

So I finally gave up and began feeding him by hand, something we both enjoyed. I really dug communing with Darryl every afternoon. I had to feed him before it got dark, because he got really jiggy then, being a bat and all. Uppity. Squirmy and snarly.

photo by Shila Wilson.

Bats are messy eaters. They make a lot of noise crunching down their mealworms, and mealworm heads and tails fall from their tiny jaws. They're also messy drinkers.

Because Liam loves to get in and help, and because he adored the bats, for several evenings I let him help me feed Darryl from the end of a long bent tweezers. He never touched or handled Darryl; he just fed one mealworm after another into that little mouth while I held the bat, and he was really good at it, better than I was. He could get them lined up just right and knew just when to release the tweezers.

photo by Shila Wilson

Along about St. Patrick's Day, Darryl spluttered while I was giving him water out of a dropper, and a droplet of water landed on Liam's cheek. At the time, I quizzed him sternly on where the water had gone, checked for any abrasions, began to worry, and the more I thought about it, and the more I learned about bats and viruses, the more troubled I became. Liam said that only one droplet landed on his cheek, and nothing went in his mouth or eyes (he wears glasses). We needed to be sure that none of Darryl's saliva contacted a mucous membrane. But we couldn't be sure. We could never be sure. Maybe there was a tiny droplet. And maybe Darryl was carrying rabies. And I didn't sleep much from then on. I'd look in the mirror in the bleary mornings, and I couldn't recognize myself. Even my hair was different--sticking up and out in all directions. Who is this puffy haint, staring back at me with red-rimmed eyes?

I thought that quickly getting both me and Liam pre-exposure rabies vaccinations would protect us, so I moved rapidly down that path. I asked you for help, and you responded magnificently. But that turned out to be a blind avenue. I am very grateful to virologist Tim Winship and faithful friend and veterinarian KatDoc "I hesitate to ask this, but why..." for gently helping me understand what I really needed to do. In a situation like this, friends like Tim and Kathi are beyond value. What happened to Liam constituted a potential exposure to rabies virus, so he would need post-exposure shots (much more expensive and involved than pre-exposure vaccinations) should Darryl test positive for the rabies virus. Oh, dear. Oh, no. And by the way, so would I. At that point, I was well past caring about me. I'd gotten us into this terrible mess; I deserved whatever awful thing happened. I could only think of my little boy.

I couldn't put our sweet Liam through those shots needlessly. They can be painful, and they're terribly expensive ($12,000). Problem: You can't test a live animal for rabies. You have to look at its brain tissue for the virus.

I will condense the heartache, worry and agonizing process of coming to the decision to euthanize and test Darryl so we'd know for sure if those post-exposure shots were necessary into two words: pure hell. When the Lord handed out reverence for small lives, he dumped the whole bucket into my heart. As my dad always said, "You've got your priorities backwards." Being built backward, it took me a weekend to get my priorities straightened out, and take this little animal I dearly loved to Columbus to be put down and tested for rabies.

If the bat tested negative, Liam wouldn't have to get ANY shots. If Darryl was rabies positive, well, we'd cross that bridge when we came to it, because we'd have to figure out who else might have had even a trivial exposure. Bill, Phoebe, me, Liam; others in Bill's family, all of us perhaps slated for post-exposure prophylaxis at $12,000 a pop. Can you take a chance that you didn't somehow inhale something as you were peering at the cute little bat you didn't know was rabid? Rabies is unforgiving, unequivocally fatal. I couldn't sit around with my head in my hands. I had to act, and act fast.

So on Monday, March 29 I packed up Dee Dee and Darryl and a sharp-shinned hawk who couldn't fly and drove my odd little ark to Columbus, to the Ohio Wildlife Center, to have Dee Dee and the hawk taken into their capable care. They also did me the service of putting Darryl down.

I sat in the OWC's tiny reception area for the better part of an hour, desolate, and watched through tears as a parade of citizens came through with animals and birds, to be met by kind volunteers and staff. A couple with a road-killed red-tailed hawk. Too beautiful to leave on the highway, I guess. Another couple with a fox squirrel contained in a trash can, its hind legs dragging behind it. Too sad to leave crawling about under the feeder. A nice woman with a hopeful smile and a wingless, tailless cardinal that she'd doubtless pulled out of a cat's jaws when it already constituted a meal. Too dreadful to leave to the cat to finish. A couple of raccoons bundled in towels. Who knows what their story was. I was staggered by the seemingly endless supply of sad cases and nice hopeful people, by the kindness of the OWC staff and volunteers. I was hit hard by the reality that I, with my two bats and my grounded sharp-shinned hawk, was just one of far too many desperately needing their immediate, free help.

I am so very grateful that OWC exists and cares and works around the clock to try to get some good out of all the sad carnage people, their machines and their pets visit on wild animals. They've taken in and cared for over 36,000 creatures since 1984. The Ohio Wildlife Center is 2 1/2 hours away from me, but it is my closest and only option when a creature needs surgery or I need expert advice on its care. I have leaned on them too many times.

Director of Animal Care, Lisa Fosco, looked at Darryl's ear and matter-of-factly declared that with impaired echolocation abilities, he'd be unreleasable anyway, which made me feel just a little bit better about the decision I'd had to make. She left the room and after awhile came back with a little Ziploc bag with Darryl wrapped in paper towels inside it. I filled out a possible rabies exposure report form, put it in the bag, and drove it to the Columbus Department of Health's laboratory outside Reynoldsburg. As I circled around the compound of imposing brick structures, I saw a man with a cattle car and asked him if he knew where the rabies lab might be. He opened the trailer door, revealing a dead cow, and said, "I hope this is it, because I gotta get this cow tested for rabies." Eep, eep, eep.

Cows, I understand, come down with rabies more than you'd think because when they see an animal in distress, say a bat crawling through the grass, they get curious and often sniff or lick it, getting bitten in the process. Bless their hearts.

Reeling a little from that encounter, I drove away and finally found a promising looking door. I rang the buzzer and a thin man appeared and led me, still carrying my little bag, to a lab covered with biohazard signs. The heavy steel door opened and a very large man with latex gloves, a shaved head and a black goatee nodded and took my little bag. "Got a bat there?" He told me that if all went well I'd hear from him the following afternoon. Which is today, as I'm writing this, the phone inches from my hand. I've tried, but I can't do anything else but write this and wait for the phone to ring.

And it just did. Darryl's test came back negative for rabies.

Good night, sweet leather-winged boy. I will hold my Liam all the closer for having loved you.


This afternoon, I start my pre-exposure vaccinations, because fools like me need more than angels, virologists and veterinarians to look after them.

The Truth about Bats and Blogs

When I was a freshman at Harvard, a wise alum gave me a piece of advice that I have carried with me throughout my life. "No matter how much you think you know about a subject," he warned, "someone who knows a whole lot more about it may be standing right behind you." For someone who's outspoken and loves to pronounce upon what little she knows, that's a potent life lesson, one that I learn again and again and again. Lest you be tempted to think it happens more at Harvard, I can attest that there are experts lurking in every corner. Here's a letter I got from Dr. Timothy Winship, who has been quietly reading my blog, but who couldn't get past Google's comment guard dogs to post this comment:

"As a professional virologist, with a background in animal viral disease, I appreciated your post about rabies in bats which contained a great deal of accurate information. A few points to clarify, though: the figure of 0.5% for rabies infection incidence in bats is cited quite a lot, but in fact this is based on a very limited sampling (it's surprising how little research on infection of bats with bat strain rabies viruses there is!). It probably isn't true, but what you must bear in mind is that 0.5% is NOT a low incidence given the number of animals we are talking about. That's one in two hundred animals, or 5 in 1000, or 50 in 10,000 and so on.

Because bats may roost in colonies of hundreds or thousands, this presents a problem. Dr. Winship continues:

"Also, most of the information we have regarding the pathology of rabies in bats is from laboratory infection of bats with canine strains of virus. Under those conditions bats develop a fairly typical pattern of disease seen in other mammals. However, very little is known about what happens when bats are infected with bat strains of the virus, and in particular how bats infect other bats. Your statement about not knowing the incubation period of the disease in bats is quite true but covers a lot of unknown ground! The actual level, or potential for asymptomatic carriage, of bat strain virus in bats is not known, i.e. I can't find any evidence in the scientific literature that anybody can tell you that an asymptomatic bat can't transmit rabies. Certainly these kinds of viruses, under the right conditions, can establish very persistent latent infections. I personally don't agree that we know that an asymptomatic bat cannot transmit the disease.

And as I think about it, who knows enough about normal bat behavior to say what's normal and what might be abnormal? Not me! Bats are bizarre little things.-JZ

Dr. Winship continues:

"The evidence from bite exposure records held by the CDC is disturbing--most cases are not from animals aggressively attacking and biting humans, i.e. acting rabid... You are right about health department records of bat testing being skewed towards unhealthy animals, but the statistics do tell us something about the geographic distribution of the disease, at least. If you haven't already seen it, here are the numbers and distribution of animal found in Ohio last year. It's also important to bear in mind that while the number of human rabies cases acquired within the US yearly is very small (averages something like one per year) the number of exposures is quite a lot higher (last I saw about 50 per year in Ohio). And, last I looked the cost of post-exposure prophylaxis was on the order of $12,000 per person. (Which makes the $700 pre-exposure shot series sound cheap). Anyway, I'm glad you're being careful. I enjoy your blog greatly and want to keep doing so for a long time! Thanks again--sorry this was so long-winded. "

This letter, like so many of your comments and emails, hit just the right note. I'm grateful to have knowledgeable and caring people reading this blog, and I'm doubly grateful when they speak up and add their own experiences to the discussion, holding up a light for us all to see by. That's one of the big reasons I can't seem to give it up--I learn so much.

Spurred by Dr. Winship's letter, I rooted around a bit to find out more about a case I'd heard about, of a Missouri man who'd had a bat get into his home in the Ozarks in October 2008 and gotten bitten by it. It's always tempting to think that someone dumb enough to handle a bat somehow has it coming to him if he gets bitten, but watching this video should persuade you otherwise. Here was a bat (the video shows file footage of a little brown, but it was more likely a big brown) that got into the living space of a home, acting normal. In the course of dealing with it, this good, intelligent, caring, wildlife-loving person allows it to climb up his coat. (Sound like something the Science Chimp might do?) It gets up next to his neck, he turns his head, hunching up his shoulder as you would; the bat gets frightened, squeezed by the coat, and nips him on the ear. Concerned, he keeps it around for a couple of days, but it acts normal and he decides to release it. His family is concerned, too, even teases him about getting rabies, but it just doesn't seem possible that anything bad could happen. It's just a bat, and people get all hysterical about bats.

Five weeks later, he falls ill, and dies painfully--all the more tragic, because his death could have been prevented by a series of injections administered immediately after the bite.

Here's the deal. If you get bitten by a bat or other rabies-vector species, you MUST get it tested and see a doctor immediately. Its brain tissue must be examined for the telltale ovoid bodies of the rabies virus. If it tests positive, you'll be given a series of shots, and you won't die. If you don't get it tested, and decide to take your chances, your family could be talking about you on a heartbreaking video like this one.

So, as enamored as I am of Dee Dee, and adorable and apparently healthy as she is, her welfare and her life is distinctly secondary to mine and my family's. The possibility that she may have a latent infection is small, but it's present, and we simply don't know enough about bat strains of rabies or normal bat behavior to say with any certainty that an asymptomatic bat is safe to handle. It's not. So if I mess up, and Dee Dee bites me, that's it. She dies, that I may live. Long sleeves and gloves for me, always, and nobody else handles her, ever.

Dr. Winship left me with a link to a terrific U.S. Geological Survey publication, available free and readable as a pdf file, that he describes as "the very best review of bat rabies I have ever found, and...recent as well." I concur wholeheartedly. Despite its foreboding title, Denny Constantine's "Bat Rabies and Other Lyssavirus Infections" is a great read.

Download it here.

Thank you, Dr. Winship, for bringing this issue into crystal-clear focus for me and my readers. It's good to have people like you, standing right behind me.

Bats and Rabies (What You've All Been Wondering)

ZICK ALERT! I'll be giving a free public lecture tonight, Thursday, at Jefferson Middle School, 21 Moffett Street, Pittsburgh, PA. Come see me! It'll be fun!

Is that a Pez dispenser, loaded with mealworms, or a bat in your glove? Nom nom nom.

All right. On to the health issue. According to the Organization for Bat Conservation, started by my friends Kim Williams and Rob Mies, I have a better chance of winning my state lottery jackpot or being murdered by my husband than dying of rabies from a bat bite. I just love that pairing of statistics.

Given my propensity for messing around with wild things, I suspect my chances of being murdered by my husband are better than average. I'm thinking of the time I promised him a turkey vulture wouldn't vomit if we drove it to Columbus in the Bird Watcher's Digest company van. And then, whoops, it did. So I'm not sure I like those odds.

Arming myself with information, I have taken a course in handling and keeping rabies vector species and learned a lot about the disease, its course in wild animals and humans, and its prevention. The course is required by the State of Ohio to get a certification to handle these species, which appears on my rehabilitation permit. The instructor of the course told me that, given the probability that I will be handling only one or two healthy bats each year, the rabies prophylaxis shots, while recommended, are neither required nor particularly warranted. If I were taking in a whole bunch of bats, coons, foxes and skunks, doing that as a full-time thing, it would be wise to get the $700 series of vaccinations. I wish it were as cheap to protect myself as it is to protect Chet. However, if I do happen to get bitten by a bat, even one that appears healthy, I'm required by law to have its head removed and sent to a state lab for testing. That's the cost of flying without a net. Obviously, my motivation to prevent myself being bitten is extremely high. I wear gloves and long sleeves, period. No one else in the house is allowed to handle the bat.

I know there are those who, reading this, will be afraid. Afraid for me, afraid for my family. I offer this: Yes, bats can get rabies. But they are not passive carriers of rabies, as I had always erroneously supposed. In fact, when they get rabies, they show symptoms and die from it, like any other mammal. Once a bat starts showing symptoms, it will be dead within a week. And only a bat showing symptoms can transmit rabies in its saliva, for the virus has to have infiltrated the brain both to cause symptoms and enter the saliva. We don't know the incubation period of rabies in bats. That would be a good thing to know. It's quite rapid--about a week to ten days--in most furbearing mammals, although one fox was known to have developed the disease 15 months after being exposed. Eep.

The percentage of wild bats with rabies is approximately one half of one percent. I was surprised to learn how low the incidence is. The percentage of bats (often visibly ill) which are brought to health departments and test positive for rabies is approximately five percent. Bats that are compromised enough to be grounded and captured are obviously a sample skewed toward sick animals.

My nephew named her Fledermaus, but I call her DeeDee. Middle name: Marie. And I am grateful that she has come into my life. It's like having a teacher in all things bat-related staying for a little while. And I can already tell that our time together will be too short.