General Discussion & Chat: What are the most awesome things you've ever touched?, 1 by snakeadelic

snakeadelic wrote:
Well, I missed my chance to touch the Spruce Goose--we didn't have time to stop at the aviation museum last time we blew through McMinnville, more's the pity :(. Only about a month ago, too. Meanwhile, though, I have a spectacular addition to my list as of this morning, though I did not touch it barehanded! Suspecting a wing injury, I had to catch the bat shown below and hand it off to a wildlife rehabilitator before the maintenance staff here where I live found it. They might have killed it on the possibility of it being sick (and the known stupidity of our local kid population, several of whom set part of the high school down the street on fire getting in the mood for the 4th of July) and if it can be rehabbed and released I'd always prefer that! We need our bats! This little dude is no bigger than my thumb, two and a half or three inches in body length, and it probably eats nearly a thousand mosquitos EVERY NIGHT. Here in West Nile risk country, you can't ignore those numbers.

And the rehabbers seem to be fairly thrilled with me: to catch Mr. Bat, I put on soft leather gloves, coaxed him from his rafter perch outside onto a plastic clothes hanger, cuddled him close until I got him upstairs, then slid the glove he refused to let go of off my hand & into a tiny, well-vented stackbox I'd cleaned & filled with paper towels this morning (used to be a baby snake house). The fella who just picked him up says he'll bring the glove back later after they figure out how to get the bat out of it, because bats like to cuddle up to fuzzy things and he'd crawled inside to snuggle on the soft side of the buckskin-like thin leather. I sure hope the little critter makes it!