Originally published at: Meet the Indian flying fox, the "big boi of the skies" | Boing Boing
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This reminded me to try to track down some of the accounts from bat Twitter. Here’s Dr. Susan Tsang, a pteropodid researcher and conservationist.
For more sky puppy pictures, there’s Hourly bats.
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I highly recco Megabattie’s yootyoob channel, and her friend Batzilla’s. Lotsa adorable Australian flying foxes, babies, oldies, and in between.
Meg(abattie) performs bat rescues, and other critters whom MOPs [members of the public] have mistaken for bats. These are sometimes quite fraught when animals are injured, and I’ve learnt it pays to read the descriptions first - I can’t handle sad endings. Meg raises some orphaned babies herself, having a pretty small setup in her apartment. Her babies are moved to other carers after differing intervals. She doesn’t keep microbats b/c she says they’re too small for her eyesight, and she knows far more about the flying foxes - the megabats.
Meg sometimes posts stuff that Mandi sends her.
Mandi, AKA Batzilla, has a series of aviaries, for bats of all ages. Mr Batzilla and their son also perform rescues and work in the aviaries and on their farm. Mostly she gets grey headed, little red (abt half the size of th’ other two species) and black flying foxes. Once in a great while she cares for the wonderful but sadly rarer tube-nosed bats. They also rescue and care for other critters. Her place takes in a lot of injured bats of all ages, adults, adolescent ‘first flyers’ who run…um, fly into trouble, and orphans, who are fixed up and/or raised to learn to be batties. Their main goal is returning them to the wild. Some are in permanent care there because they are unable to live in the wild. She had a marvelous old man bat named Walter, who came from a zoo where he’d begun falling off his perches. He became a sensation on her channel, with fans worldwide who loved him whether he was being sweet or cranky AF. He is much missed, but his vids are still great.
Neither Meg nor Mandi have gov’t funding, and operate on volunteer work, donations, and their own dime. There are links to donate in their vids’ descriptions.
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Squee! I didn’t know about these channels and now I’m hooked. We used to get flying foxes in our back yard eating figs off the tree, and I’d refused to net the tree because I couldn’t live with myself if we’d injured one. I don’t live under their flight path anymore but the largest inner city colony is just off my cycling commute and I drop in sometimes.
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Too cool!!!
So glad I could hip you to these lovely batty ladies and their charges!
I forgot about another wonderful raiser of baby bats, Baby Bats & Buddies of Australia
She often explains a lot re: bats & caring for them. She also gets only donations to do this work, and she includes a paypal link in her descriptions.
Meet the expressive Nero. Even his feet have something to say.
James was a true delight.
Feisty was an aptly named young lady.
Bonus:
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vespertiliaries?
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… batteries 
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A large Fruitbat tackles a human to the ground.
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That parent bat’s expression. “I’ve made a huge mistake. I’m never going to get a good day’s sleep again.”
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LOLZ
The bat ladies still call 'em aviaries
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