Baby Bat!

Things were, as they always are, very interesting and fun at The Wildlife Center of Virginia this morning, but shortly before my volunteer gig ended everything took a batty turn. First there was a baby bat - in today's blip - that was brought in [A colony of them evicted from a house??? Something like that]. The dime in the photo was hopefully for some scale ~ for those of you unfamiliar with the dime, its diameter is 1.7 cm. Anyway - the baby bat was absolutely adorable and there was an enormous amount of picture taking and squealing going on (the humans were squealing, not the bat). He (he is a he) weighed 2.7 grams.

And then! Another bat. This one an adult female, who appeared either to be very pregnant or have some disastrous growth in her abdomen. An x-ray revealed the answer! See the extra photo.

*I have now googled to see about bat pregnancies! I'm assuming Mama is a Big Brown Bat - if so, Google says this: 
In the eastern United States, twins are commonly born sometime in June; in western North America, females give birth to only one pup each year.


So - here in Virginia - twins are the rule, rather than the exception!