The Place Where I Bury My Bats

Wildlife rehabilitation helped me find new meaning in a post-pandemic world

Photo by Dim Hou on Unsplash

To get to the place where I bury my bats, I walk a broken, concrete path through my backyard. The scant weight I carry feels heavier than the body of a mammal smaller than my palm. Rose bushes direct me to soldier on to the lemon tree that perennially bears fruit. Above the thorny citrus is a redwood jungle gym for the squirrels. They never hush for my funerary rites. Below all of this is the graveyard for my bats.

When I first started volunteering with a wildlife rehabilitation group specializing in bats this past year, I didn’t foresee that I would inter more than I release back to the wild. Though the eclectic women of NorCal Bats are kind and supportive, though I know that their bats die just as easily as mine, I can’t bring myself to disclose to them the specifics of all my failures. If I described the detailed circumstances of my mistakes, I fear two things could happen: What if they make assumptions about my ability to keep humans alive at the hospital where they know I work? Worse yet, what if they took the bats from me? Caring for the bats has been so enriching that I changed the patterns of my daily life to accommodate them, which inspired me to keep rearranging my life so that creative writing could take precedence over my unsatisfying medical career. 

After practicing as a physician assistant in emergency medicine and intensive care through the direst parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, I suffered from burnout and post-traumatic stress. Before the pandemic, I could lay my hands on the newly dead and wish them well in their new journey. Two years into the pandemic, the beep of monitors in the ICU made me sweat and the tremor in my hands was no longer a secret. I saw more death in those two years than my entire thirteen-year career. I entered the pandemic passionate about the healthcare needs of my community. I exited the pandemic feeling that my goodwill had been misunderstood, and with the new existential conundrum that perhaps nothing we do in medicine matters in the end. During those endless, sad nights in the hospital while the sick grew sicker and patient numbers peaked, I watched internet wildlife feeds and webcams for comfort. The bat content was my favorite. I was drawn to them because I understood what it was to be misunderstood—and we both enjoyed the dark.

Even if I had comprehended the dismal statistics of wildlife rehabilitation, I was so desperate for a new purpose in a post-pandemic world that I know my overconfidence would have superseded that knowledge. I didn’t yet realize that my involvement in medicine would sour even more, and in the end, I would seek a new career. My whole life I had been writing prose; but I still felt that writing was a hobby, and that I owed it to some greater entity to practice medicine. I was shell-shocked, lost, and disenchanted when I discovered that I too could doctor and foster bats in need.

To become a heroine to bats, I first got vaccinated for rabies. Then I joined a permitted group and took their requisite class about our local species: Mexican free-tails, canyon bats, big and little brown bats. I studied Amanda Loller’s gold standard manual, The Rehabilitation and Captive Care of Insectivorous Bats, and naively thought that, paired with my medical training, I was sufficiently prepared. I painfully learned that human medicine doesn’t equate to animal medicine. Keeping tiny animals alive can be tremendously difficult.

A few months ago, I got a pair of canyon bats who had both fractured their arm bones high up near their shoulder joints. I had just crowdfunded a handsome, zoological incubator and I was proud to have it for them to lay up in. The pair had almost identical breaks on their left sides, so I called them collectively The Broken Bats. They didn’t live long enough to get individual names.

One of the bats Jessica Harvey has cared for as part of her post-COVID-19 pandemic foray into wildlife rehabilitation

I didn’t have any of the glue that I use to set fractures that first day I got them, so they both careened around the incubator chirping and squawking and dragging their left wings. I studied the repair of their fractures in the rehab book. There is a single veterinarian in my metropolitan area who will see bats as patients, but I didn’t want her help. I thought I could give The Broken Bats a better chance to fly again, to return to the wooded smell of crevices and to the stiff crunch of hunted down insects. I believed that I would one day walk them back out to the wild where they belonged. At that time, I was under the impression that amputation was a terrible life for a captive bat, which I later learned was wrong.

I brought the glue home from the hospital the next day. Canyon bats are about the size of a half-dollar coin, and I knew that it would be tricky to not get glue all over them when I set their fractures. It was so myopic of me to have thought that accidentally gluing the tail to the toes or even my hand to theirs was a worst-case scenario. To isolate the broken wing and prevent this, I devised a set of slings out of gauze strips. I considered waiting for my partner to come home to lend her two hands to the situation.

The first bat thrashed, shrieked, and spit, so I loosely covered his head with a towel and then started gluing. Eventually, he stopped. As he grew still and quiet, I panicked. When I threw off the towel, he looked like he was trying to wretch against an obstruction. After he went limp, I laid him on his back and compressed his tiny chest over and over. His mouth was stuck wide open; I couldn’t figure out why he was arresting.

When the bat finally died in my hands, I examined his small tongue closely. The glue had gotten into his mouth. He had inhaled it. Then the glue expanded as it dried in his airway, and he asphyxiated. Devastated, I apologized repeatedly as I wrapped him up in the towel. I walked the path out the backyard with the bat held to my heart. I felt like I was suffocating as I dug another grave under the lemon tree. I was so ashamed, and I told no one but my partner what had happened.

I didn’t work on the other Broken Bat that night. I let him pace the incubator and tried to distract him with the softest mealworms I could find in the bin. I did successfully set the fracture the next day, but he stopped eating after that and soon passed. 

Ever since The Broken Bats, I’m more hesitant, less presumptuous. I take the stable bats that don’t require heroic measures. Perhaps I cloud the truth of this to my group, using the graduate writing program I recently started as my excuse.

Though I’m not the heroine that I hoped to be, bat rehabilitation has been crucial in helping me change my life. Two years ago, I was so burned out and traumatized in my career that I needed something to help me see the path out to a different life. My routine felt immutable, and I was overwhelmed by my dissatisfaction with medicine. But when pup season came in the spring, I joyfully woke through the night to feed the pups. In the dark, I warmed their formula, put on my magnifying glasses, and then dripped it into their mouths from a pipette. I started leaving work on time so I could retrieve bats in the field. I made small changes so that something else could take the forefront in my life besides medicine. Then I realized that I could let my old ways die, and that my service to medicine could be over. Bat rehabilitation helped me to see that it was acceptable and possible to prepare for a new career, which led me to my literature and creative writing graduate program. 

The path out my back door is flanked by false orange shrubs. Moss overgrows the concrete in the rainy season. There is a small meadow of golden poppies newly speciating the landscape. Into each tiny grave I dig with my spade under the lemon tree, I keen for what I couldn’t save. I cover each dear, dead bat with earth. The ground is knobby and pocked with their burial sites. The squirrels host a never-ending wake above them. The Broken Bats are side by side, and when I sit down cross-legged to visit them, I’m grateful they showed me a new way back to the wild.

Jessica Harvey writes memoir and literary fiction. She is pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing and literature at Harvard Extension School. Jessica lives in northern California with a menagerie of bats and dogs. You can find her on Instagram or at her website.