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.

Big Brown Batgirl

Big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus

Fasten your seatbelts. I'm gonna go all bats on you. And you're going to love it. Bats are pretty much my favorite animal now, right after ligers. Which, as you probably know, are bred mainly for their skills in magic.

Back to bats.

It's a late winter Wednesday. My mother-in-law, Elsa Thompson, notices a bat flying around in her living room and kitchen. While most people would scream and dive for cover, Elsa takes mild note of the event and hopes she will eventually find the bat where she can catch it. She's done this before. And she is not your garden-variety mother-in-law, being co-founder of both Bird Watcher's Digest and The Marietta Natural History Society.

Friday. Elsa opens the basement door and sees a bat roosting in the jamb, near her pegboard full of pots and pans. She captures it in a towel and installs it in a glass vase with a towel in the bottom and colander over the top. Later, she adds a ball of raw hamburger and a cut-up grape. She calls me and tells me she's seen the bat tugging at the grape. What else should she offer it? That evening, I swoop in on my way to the movies and give the bat a dozen mealworms off the end of a tweezers. Thank goodness I always keep mealworms on hand in a couple of plastic shoeboxes, where they reproduce and offer themselves up to save whatever foundling I have on hand, even in January. The bat is very hungry and thirsty, having expended valuable energy by flying around a warm house for three days. It's evidently found its way downstairs from the cold attic, where it should be hibernating.

While we're holding the bat in a towel, it squirms around and gets away, making loops around the living room. It vanishes and I stand stock-still in the living room, looking carefully. I find it resting atop a warm DVD player, and pick it up in the towel to continue feeding it. I will not realize until much later how lucky I was to have relocated that animal.

Sunday. I pick the bat up in the evening. Elsa's been ably caring for it and feeding it in the meantime. I've called the Ohio Wildlife Center and found out that protocol for a healthy bat found in a warm house in midwinter is to keep it until it can be released outside in spring. Oh! My! That sounds like a job! Thank goodness I'm permitted and certified by the State of Ohio to handle and keep rabies vector species like bats. Even so, I make plans to have Bill transport it to the OWC clinic in Columbus in the morning, where they are hosting eight overwintering bats in just the same straits. He's on his way to the airport anyway. You see, I am just a little eepy about handling and keeping a bat in my house. I am thinking rabies and disease and gloves and towels and guano and kids and eep eep eep.

Who are you, little one? You're so foreign to me. I have no mental template for how you should look or behave. I need to know you.

Something happens to my brain (not a dread viral disease, but a chemical shift) between Sunday night and Monday morning, and I decide not to unload the bat on OWC just yet. I've been researching bat care online. And I want to make sure it can feed itself from a dish. I want to make sure it's in top condition before I fob it off on anyone else. I want to get to know it better. And I have a small suspicion that I'm falling out of fear and into love.


It's a female, and she seems thin and ribby to me, maybe a bit dehydrated. She chitters and cusses at me in an ultrasonic voice when I handle her. She sounds like an angry hummingbird, bzzbzzbzzzbzzbzzzbzzbzzz! For the next two days, I hold her in my glove while I feed her crickets twice a day. I can feel her voice vibrating even when I can't hear her. Then I find a good piece online, written by Susan Bernard of Basically Bats, called Bats in Captivity, which warns that hand-fed bats might not take food again on their own. Uh-oh. I decide to offer mealworms and crickets in a little shallow dish, and water in another as they suggest, and quit handling her to feed her. It seems a better solution all around.

By now the bat is installed in a plastic pet carrier meant for small mammals and reptiles. I've got a washcloth doubled and draped down the side where she can hang upside down in comfortable darkness. The food and water dishes are on paper towels below her. Since she'd be hibernating anyway, she doesn't need to fly around, and she's perfectly still and sleeping all day. The next morning, the mealworm dish stands empty. Well, that was easy. The next night, I creep in with a little flashlight cupped in my palm so only a tiny ray of light sneaks out, and I catch her elbowing over to her mealworm dish, which she lustily empties. I let a little more light fall on her and she glares at me and retreats into her washcloth roost, a tiny, deeply offended Dracula, fleeing the dawn. By now I am completely in love. I'm glad I don't have to handle her and stress her, and she is, too.

Maybe I can do this bat care gig. She's a whole lot less trouble than a macaw. And she is really, really adorable.

I'll be speaking about this little messenger from above (and a bunch of other stuff) starting at 5:30 PM tomorrow night, Friday, March 12, at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, for its William and Nancy Klamm Memorial Lecture in its Explorer series. There will be live music, refreshment, exhibits, a book signing, Phoebe and a very excited, dino-crazy Liam in attendance. I've spent the week tearing my Letters from Eden talk all to bits as only a crazy Mac Lady can. It's all new. If you're anywhere near Cleveland, I'd love to meet you. Remember to blurt "BLOG!" You can register here.

If you miss the Cleveland talk, come hear me at nearby Black River Audubon's "Outstanding Speakers" series the very next night, Saturday, March 13, at 7 pm. It'll be at Lorain Co. (Ohio) Metroparks' Carlisle Visitor Center. Details are here. Another big weekend!

And on Sunday I'll tell you more about the big brown bat. There is a lot to tell.