Some vets specialize in cats and dogs. Other specialize in farm animals. Kerrin Hoban specializes in bats. She’s already performed dozens of microsurgical procedures on the flying mammals at the Harbor Veterinary Hospital. She is giving new meaning to Lewis Carroll’s (not-so) famous poem,
“Twinkle, twinkle little bat.
“How I wonder what you’re at!
“Up above the world you fly,
“Like a tea-tray in the sky,
“Twinkle, twinkle little bat.
“How I wonder what you’re at!”
She works closely with the California Bat Conservation Fund, a nonprofit group that is dedicated to saving California’s dwindling bat population, and even lives with one of its members, Karen Moreno. But Hoban is also one of very few vets anywhere who actually tend to bats. In fact, she had to teach herself to do it, back in 1998.
Most of the bats that she treats are collected off the side of the road. They are usually very small creatures, who often collide with car antennas, and show up with fractured wings. Though Hoban tends to all of them to the best of her ability, the animals are seldom able to be released back into the wild. Once their wings are damaged, it is difficult for them to swoop down on the insects that are their main prey.
Instead, the animals are used to teach children to respect the local bat population and—most of all—not to be afraid of them. The bat population across the US has decreased by about 80 percent over the past 20 years, she says, largely because the insects they feed on are affected by the pesticides used in commercial agriculture. Hopefully the students who meet the bats she has helped will do their part to help the remaining bats too. Read more at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
