If science fiction’s vision of what life on another planet may look like is anything to go by then her description seemed appropriate. The tiny baby bat nestling in Haidee Chamberlain’s hand could have been from another world. In science fact it was from Boho!

    The orphan is the latest and most challenging addition to the Chamberlain menagerie. The family home on the Navar Forest road outside Derrygonnelly is sanctuary to an assortment of stray and abandoned cats and dogs, a guinea pig, rabbit, and two juvenile jackdaws called Rory and Molly.

    Haidee does not have any children, and is vowing never to have any, after sampling the trials and tribulations of motherhood courtesy of her new arrival - the round-the-clock feeding, the sleepless nights and the struggle of being a working “mum.”

    It all began just over a week ago with a telephone call to the Lakeland Veterinary Clinic in Derrygonnelly. A woman from Boho had rescued an adult bat which had been mauled by a cat and wanted to know what she should do with the injured animal. Haidee, who is employed with the Environment and Heritage Service at Castle Archdale, was called in. Although no expert, her work with the EHS includes educating members of the public about bats.

    “I go around and advise people who might have problems with bats in their houses,” explains the 28-year-old.

    She informs them about bat ecology, how the bats came to be there and, if the animals are a problem, how to obtain an exclusion order, as these little mamals are heavily protected by law and permission has to be sought before any action can be taken to keep them out of a house or building where they are roosting.

    Haidee points out that bats suffer from a bad press and part of her task is to dispel some of the myths which surround these nocturnal creatures. They are not smelly, do not spread disease, do not fly into your hair and, the most popular myth of all, do not suck your blood. In reality the bats we get in Ireland feed exclusively on insects and do us all a favour by hoovering up up to 3,000 biting midges in a night!

    When Haidee called at the house at Boho the woman who answered the door was in an excited state, explaining: “I’ve had such a shock. I’ve just checked on the bat and I think it has had a baby.”

    On examining the mother Haidee found puncture marks on her wings and body, indicative of her having been mauled by a cat.

    “Cats are notorious for attacking bats,” she explains.

    “I put the baby on her belly like in the wild but she didn’t want to know and shook it off,” says Haidee. Sadly the mother died two days later. In the meantime Haidee was left, literally holding the baby. But how do you go about rearing a little orphan born blind, pink and hairless and no bigger than a human thumbnail?

    She sought expert advice from Lynne Rendle, a member of the Northern Ireland Bat Group, and combined that with her own knowledge of looking after young animals.

    In the wild bats rear their young in communal nursery roosts. There can be up to 500 bats in a small space, maybe in the corner of an attic, and the heat generated is phenomenal.

    In order to replicate those conditions Haidee took her little orphan home, put it in a fur hat salvaged from the wardrobe and put the hat on top of a hot water bottle beside the cooker in the kitchen. She reckoned the fur would not only keep the baby warm but resemble a mother bat.

    Heat is important in helping a baby bat digest milk but just how to you get milk into a creature not much bigger than a thumbnail?

    “My initial panic was how was I going to feed it,” Haidee admits. “Even a cotton bud dipped in milk would seem like a boxing glove to it.”

    She tried dipping her finger in milk and offering it to the tiny orphan but that did not work. Her father, Ray, stripped the core from fine electrical cable to produce a mini pipette but even that was too big.

    Then Haidee remembered she had a very fine artist’s paint brush. She dipped it in the goat’s milk and the bat began to suck.

    Initially the bady had to be fed every hour, day and night. Now that has been extended to every hour-and-a-half during the day, and three-and-a-half to four hours at night.

    And each morning after breakfast Haidee gently lowers her baby into the fur hat, placing the hat on top of a hot water bottle on the front passenger seat of her car for the journey to work. There are no crèche facilities at Castle Archdale so the bat nestles in the hat on the corner of Haidee’s desk and every 90 minutes the work is set to one side while baby is fed.

    The round-the-clock care and attention has seen the tiny orphan more than double in size in the past week. However, Haidee knows there is a long way to go. In the past she has looked after a kestrel and a leveret, a baby hare, neither of which survived. “We are not out of the woods yet,” she says.

    She will have to wean baby off milk and on to “solids,” a tasty mix of maggots and meal worms, but believes it unlikely that her bat will ever be able to return fully to the wild. If it survives it seems destined to become a permanent member of the Chamberlain menagerie. At the moment it is a menagerie which includes two juvenile jackdaws, Rory and Molly. Both were found as chicks at Tully Castle on the shores of Lower Lough Erne, a short distance from the Chamberlains’ home. Haidee advises against picking up wild baby birds as their parents will usually come to their rescue but in this case Rory and Molly had been abandoned and would not have survived.

    Rory, the older of the two, has thrived on the Chamberlain hospitality. Even though he can now fly and often joins the flocks of wild jackdaws on sorties over the surrounding countryside he always returns home in time for tea - a plate of cat food. The problem is that Rory is just too friendly. He and Haidee’s mother, Janet, are inseparable. He comes to her call and likes nothing better than to sit on her shoulder and keep her company in the garden. He even joins the family at meal times.

    As Haidee points out, any attempt to reintroduce him to the wild at Tully Castle is frought with one major problem. A jackdaw landing on one’s shoulder is likely to conjure up images from Alfred Hitchcock’s film, “The Birds.”