I want to do something for animals in my country...
Does anyone have any experience in tgus field? How to make a difference in animals life? Establishing a shelter? A hospital? What is the most productive way for helping animals?
First two didn't make it because I found them in the middle of winter, and didn't comprehend what to do. First appeared in a house I was house sitting (old man moved away during covid to a home) and the bat flew from the dining room into the living room, and I captured it under a blanket. I let it live on the side of a folgers instant coffee singles teabag box. It's really important to remember once they attach themselves to the teabag box, you can't use the teabags again. They belong to the bat now.
It hung on the side of the box most of the winter but I read they don't tend to survive even when helped because they dehydrate or starve, so I kept buying it mealworms and regularly gave it water but it just hanged there.
Eventually it warmed up enough one day and was sorta close to spring and I was afraid if I left to dk stuff it would wake up and not find the food in time and starve, so I put it outside on the V of a tree branch. It woke up and started crying and looked so cute, but I was insistent it fly away, it was above 40F.
I came back at night and temperature was below 30F which is below freezing for those living in countries with fake temperature scales. It was still there so I felt real bad. I put it back on it's coffee box and it looked dead. Next day it was hanging again, but never moved from that position again no matter how warm it got.
Next bat was found by me while walking, feel from a treebranch during a warm spell storm the next winter. It likewise never woke up or move. Never knew if it was dead or alive.
So I about gave up. I never touched them directly out of fear of disease. Moved on, until a old crazy Turk was screaming about bats in his attic. By this time I built a few bat boxes and installed them on the sunny side of trees next to clearings in the woods. This is a pic from the net of a bat box:
My boxes were new and so never really attracted bats yet. So I put on work gloves, long sleeve shirt and ballistic glasses incase they shot shrapnel into my eyes and removed them from the attic, and put them in a box. Them I put them in the boxes. The sun warmed the boxes up enough in the winter to keep them alive and they seemed to live just fine from checking on them.
Reason I'm not scared of bats is because I used to explore abandoned mines and caves, and lost my way in a mine once after a animal bit through my fishing line I used to mark my path (raccoon and groundhog tracks in the clay floor everywhere). I found after a few hours a room with a room of limestone that collapsed and formed a big domed room. I laid in it for a while wondering if it was going to be my tomb because I told no one where I was, it involved impossible acrobatics to travel from a fox's den to enter through the back of it into the hidden mine shaft, and it was the first day of christmas break. I could be missing for days and nobody would notice, certainly not my mother who didn't care. So I just laid there. Then I noticed one time I turned the flashlight on there was a couple of bats. Turned it off thinking maybe I could est them tomorrow if hungry. Then I turned it on again and looked at them wondering how they got so deep into the mine. So I got up, crawled to the room's exit, and just listened till I heard a breeze and followed it, and found my way out.
