Welcome to the first e-newsletter of The Bat Hospital

The Visitor Centre is open Wednesday to Sunday, June to September from 3-6pm. Bookings are essential at other times of the year. We prefer to keep to the 3-6pm timeslot as it is feeding time for the bats and this gives visitors the best experience. It also gives us the morning to get some work done. We are meeting some wonderful people through the Visitor Centre.

TICK SEASON The paralysis tick season has been very tiring. It began unusually early, in early September, and has never really stopped. We suspect it's because of the weather. We've had an unusually dry year, and then not enough rain to put a stop to the ticks, as usually happens around Christmas. It is mid-January now and we have 17tick bats in hospital! Most are lactating females or babies. Lakeside colony is affected a lot more than Tolga. Unfortunately this is the first year we were forced to stop daily searches because of the enormous workload of caring for hundreds of bats at the hospital. We stopped for about 3 weeks in November.

We've had an interesting mix of nationalities volunteering here this tick season. Reiko from Japan,
Jiyoung and MJ from Korea, Dan and Cheryl from USA, Sabine from the Netherlands, Charlotte
from the UK, Emma from Scotland, Marie-Eve from Quebec, Maureen and Katherine from Canada,
Anna and Karin from Germany.

We introduced a new system this year to manage the large numbers of orphans. We converted the workshed into a nursery to make room for 5 trolleys. Each trolley had a kind of open cage on top from which the bats could hang. The floor of this cage could be easily raised so that the babies could lie down, and then lowered again so they could hang. The other big advantage is that the trolleys could easily be wheeled outside during the day into the sun.

AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT GRANTS

We have received 2 federal government grants in the last month. The Volunteer Grant recognises the important contribution that volunteers make in our community. It provided $2000 for fuel and $900 for a television for the volunteer room. The Caring for Country Community Action grant helps community groups take action to conserve and protect their natural environment. We received $6818.18 for Supporting Spectacled Flying-foxes as Natural Resource Managers in the Wet Tropics.

SPOTLIGHT ON EMMA

Emma first volunteered with the bat hospital in December 2008 for one month. She returned in August 2009 for the official opening of the Visitor Centre and has come back again in December 2009. Read more on our volunteering page. This photo was taken while Emma was out spotlighting with Alan's Wildlife Tours. Alan donates a free tour to our long stay volunteers.

WILDLIFE FRIENDLY FENCING

The project is still going well and it is looking like we'll do a fourth reprinting of the brochure. There have been a lot of Little Red flying foxes coming into care off barbed wire fences in early January 2010.

WORMFARMS AND COMPOSTING

Jiyoung was able to help us update the TBH website, especially the shopping pages. Have a look, especially at the new tshirts.

WORKPLACE HEALTH AND SAFETY

We are in the process of updating our health and safety procedures. Day volunteers will be asked to sign in each time, and all volunteers will be asked to sign an induction form. There will be different induction forms for vaccinated and unvaccinated volunteers.

BIG BOYS

In the last few weeks we have had 3 very large male Spectacled flying foxes admitted to the hospital. One off a barbed wire fence weighed 1017 gms, and two with tick paralysis weighed 1045 and 1077gms. Sue Churchill's book Austrlaian Bats listed the maximum weight for SFFs as 950gms.