Texas Woman is Landlady to 30,000 Bats

ABCNews.com

August 15, 2001

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.

When the time comes, the animals are returned to the wild. But sometimes injuries are so severe that Lollar's only option is to put the bats into what she calls permanent retirement in an indoor "flight cage."

Adopting a Bat

Lollar and her fellow bat-lovers are worried that the bat population is steeply declining.

Every day she checks on her charges, looking for orphans or injured animals in need of special attention, and then cares for the free and healthy bats at her wild sanctuary.

She holds workshops to teach others what she has learned, gives tours to school groups and runs programs like "Adopt-a-Bat" to raise money to pay for the hundreds of pounds of mealworms and fruit the bats consume every month.

For bat-lovers and "people who have everything," she says the "Adopt-a-Bat" program offers the opportunity to get up-close-and-personal with a fuzzy little creature that most people seldom even see. Participants can even pick out which bat they wish to adopt: Cleobatra, Rocky Batboa, or Casper (an albino), among them.

"They're the most endangered land mammal in North America because of human expansion," says Lollar. "Being able to undo some of the damage we've done to them is one of the best feelings in the world for me."

Copyright 2001 ABCNEWS.com