12/09/2026
🦇🖤 A DIFFICULT BAT TO LIFE UPDATE 🖤🦇
This is a post I’ve been putting off writing because, if I’m honest, I still don’t really know what to make of it myself.
At one point, the Bat Hotel had six residents.
Now, there is just one female remaining.
Since moving into the new house, I’ve sadly lost two bats from the group. The other residents made the move without issue, and the bats were transported with as little disturbance as possible, so there’s nothing to suggest the move itself was the cause.
Both of the bats I lost were healthy weights, behaving normally and showing no obvious signs of injury or illness beforehand.
One of those losses was actually caught on the Bat Cam.
She had been eating normally, went to climb and then suddenly collapsed. Within a very short space of time, she was gone.
The footage has since been recorded over, but it’s not something I’m likely to forget.
Because these bats had been living together, and because some of them were very difficult to distinguish from one another without handling them unnecessarily, I also can’t say with certainty which female is now the final resident of the Bat Hotel.
The bats who passed were sent to APHA for testing in the hope that there might be some explanation for what happened.
So far, I’ve received nothing back to suggest a cause.
And that is one of the hardest parts of wildlife rehabilitation.
We can monitor their weight.
We can watch their behaviour.
We can provide warmth, food, hydration, safe accommodation and veterinary support when needed.
We can check for injuries, parasites and anything else we can physically see.
But sometimes, there are things happening inside these tiny bodies that give us absolutely no warning.
And sometimes, despite doing everything we can, we still lose them.
That never gets easier.
Every single bat that comes into my care matters to me, and every loss makes me question everything — whether I missed something, whether I could have done something differently, whether there was some sign I should have seen.
But sometimes there simply isn’t an answer.
Wildlife rehabilitation is not just the happy release videos and the little personalities you all get to know.
It is also uncertainty, worry, heartbreak and occasionally having to accept that doing everything you can does not always mean you can save them.
For now, I’ll continue keeping a very close eye on the remaining little lady in the Bat Hotel and doing everything I can to keep her healthy, comfortable and hopefully moving towards the day she can return to the wild.
I just wanted to be honest about this side of rehabilitation too.
Because these little lives deserve to be remembered, even when their stories don’t end the way we hoped 🖤🦇
