Recognize this little guy?
Bats are occasional visitors on our campus. When Small first opened, the silo stairs were completely enclosed with corrugated steel. No insulation, no windows, very little ventilation.
Temperatures in the silo soared above 100 degrees. Solutuion? Cut large ventilation slits and cover them with wire mesh. This did work. It brought the temperatures down, but the mesh wasn't the proper gauge and bats attempted to colonize it.
Another time, two students found a bat on the ground barely breathing. Naturally, they picked it up bare handed. Animal control promptly incarcerated the bat and sent it off for rabies testing. The students sweated out the results with visions of impending shots. The bat flunked its rabies test. The faculty seized the teachable moment and went over bat safety. Bat Conservation International, headquartered here in Austin, offers a poster for schools regarding this very topic. And speaking of BCI, Kari Gaukler once visited my classes and captivated the students with bat facts and fiction.
Our latest flying mammal visitor suddenly appeared in Ms. Mazac's 3rd floor classroom. This was not the first time she's been visited. Mr. Poliakoff (admittedly this info is at least third-hand) apprehended the cuprit. Next stop for our furry perp, the office. That's when I walked into an excited scene in the front office. Ms. Teinert had the offender under her desk (darkest nearby spot) in order to calm it down. Nice thinking- it worked.
I took it to my advisory class, grabbed the kids and the camera, and proceeded to the Bat Box Hilton, erected near our track as a part of Garrett Dunaway's Eagle Scout project.
After a couple of minutes, our newfound friend flew off.
Transplantation Tuesday
One lucrative trick of the nursery trade is to buy flats (trays) of plant starts in 4" pots and repot them in larger containers. The process is known as "bumping up." All three classes helped.
The previous day, students seeded trays of three tomato varieties, sweet bell peppers, jalepeno peppers and little bluestem grass.
Click on the photo to watch us work:
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