Baby bat's first taste of fruit: this is Asha

Описание: Little Asha is a 6 week old orphan Black Flying-Fox and is just tasting her first fruit.
She clearly loves it and I'm not fast enough feeding the little pieces of soft sweet pear into her mouth.

Asha is a Black Flying-Fox in care with a specialist wildlife bat carer. It's quite late in the season for such a young baby to come into care. She is being hand raised for release. When she's 3 months old she will go to a creche where there will be other late babies from the season. She will shrug off her human conditioning and learn to be a bat.

It's important to love her, to talk to her and treat her as a baby, because bats are colony animals. They are used to a loving mother and a lot of action and interaction in the colony. We replicate this when bringing up the babies. At 3 months they'd be naturally becoming more independent and separating from their mums a little and interacting with the colony and other juvies, and learning batty etiquette.
So we send them to batty creche where they learn how to be bats again with the other orphans from the season.

They're released around 5 months of age if they're healthy, have no injuries, and are an appropriate weight with an appropriate forearm measurement, and if they are flying well. They're held back if they're not emotionally and physically fit for release and survival in the wild.
There is always support feeding available when they're released, hung on the outside of the release cage, until they no longer need it.
The system seems to work really well.

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