Flight of the Orphaned Bats

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Bat World
Head of Bat World NOVA and a volunteer rehabilitator of sick, injured or abandoned bats, Leslie Sturgesher rescues orphans, checks on a large colony in a McLean park and dispells myths.

Sturges spends almost as much time battling the myths as she does caring for the animals. They are not blind. They are less likely to be carrying rabies than a raccoon or a skunk. They are not rodents. They have their own order -- chiroptera, or Latin for "hand wing" -- that evolved over 45 million years, perhaps from such insectivores as the shrew.

Those adaptations are impressive, too. Unlike birds, each elongated finger can alter the shape of a bat's wing and thus its airflow, allowing maximum maneuverability, said Michael R. Gannon, a professor at Penn State University. They also use their wings like baseball mitts to field bugs.

Their sonar -- delivered in rapid pulses -- will speed up and change in pitch as they lock in on a target. Adaptations such as these are why the military tried to transform bats into living bombs during World War II. And they are also what piqued Sturges's interest.

The basement of her Annandale home is like an ER, maternity ward and summer camp for bats. Past the refrigerator -- and its sign saying "BEER, BATS & BUGS" -- is a screened area for mature bats she uses in educational presentations at Montgomery County's Locust Grove Nature Center at Cabin John Regional Park, where she is employed as a naturalist.

"Because my ear is trained to hear it, I can hear them when they're talking to each other," Sturges said. "It's like a clicking. But when they're arguing, you can hear them two rooms away. It's a high-pitched screech."

When the birthing season was in full swing in June, Sturges was particularly busy. Especially when the temperature climbs, pups are sometimes jostled loose from their mothers' crowded roosts. They fall to the ground, are unable to climb back and become easy pickings for such predators as cats.

Other pups are brought to her by people who find her through Bat World or the Wildlife Rescue League. Every five hours, she must feed them milk with a syringe.

Some never recover and must be euthanized. Those that survive and learn to fly will go back to the wild. Others become performers in her educational presentations.

Cages hold the pups -- some no bigger than a thumb -- that she nurses until their release. Nearby, a small tub seethes with mealworms, which she buys 10,000 at a time.

Out back is the flight cage, built by her husband, Richard, a Naval architect. It is essentially a screened gazebo with the eerie glow of black lights to attract insects. A visitor peering through the screens can see a bat circling around as if being whirled at the end of a string.

Someone might be creeped out, if he wasn't also a little charmed, especially when Sturges looks in on a new arrival: a pup someone found clinging to a lawn chair.

Cupped in the palm of her gloved hand, it looks -- being generous here -- disgusting. The head, vaguely triangular, has little plummy splotches on each side where the eyes are still shut. The skin, stretched over the bones like a busted tent, is faintly pink. The entire pup is about as big as a quarter and resembles a wad of chewed bubble gum -- except that it is moving. It crawls across Sturges's palm, pulling itself along with the thumbs of its wings, opening its mouth in big gulps.