Like a lot of people, Amanda Lollar used to think bats were scary, disgusting creatures of the night that enjoy sucking the blood of humans.
But a chance encounter in her hometown of Mineral Wells, Texas—home to more bats than any other state in the nation—changed all that. And now she wants to change the way the rest of America looks at the animals she spends time cuddling, caressing, and calling "Sweetie Pie."
"I like them because they're the underdog," says Lollar. "They're probably the most misunderstood animal on the planet."
A Haven for Bats
Ten years ago, after a sweltering day working in her family's furniture shop, Lollar almost stepped on a distressed bat. Her dislike of the winged creatures was suddenly overwhelmed by sympathy for a helpless animal "roasting alive" on the hot pavement.
She scooped it up in a newspaper to take it home to die in her cool basement. But it didn't die.
Lollar did some reading on bats and nursed her new friend back to health.
She eventually turned her family's furniture store into Bat World, a rehabilitation center for injured bats. She then bought another building down the street, which she transformed into a wild bat sanctuary, housing up to 30,000 bats on any given night.
"I fell in love with bats and just completely went batty," she says.
The injured bats usually come from either her multiple checks per day at the wild bat sanctuary—when you have that many bats in one place, there are apt to be some injuries—or from people who come across injured bats, just as Lollar did years ago.
When the bats arrive at Bat World, Lollar—who has no advanced training, but says she's learned on the job—determines what's wrong and then begins the often slow process of rehabilitating them.
For the orphan bats that she finds in abundance in the summer (sometimes 10 or 20 per night), this can mean feeding them with the tip of an eyelash brush. For adults, this can mean setting a broken wing or giving antibiotics for an infection.
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