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We are having a rough winter here in Ontario and a colony of bats has been woken up and they were freezing to death. Toronto Wildlife has come to the rescue. They are a group that rescues wildlife that has run into problems. They do a lot of good. The bat rescue is just one more good deed on the part of Toronto Wildlife.

For the bats however it was the matter of life and death.
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/01/..._cold.html

http://metronews.ca/news/toronto/899439/...eadly-cold

That is a lot of meal worms and other supplies to save these bats.
I think since this is in my area I will need to make some kind of donation. We can't support every cause, but I do try to help my local ones.
Now that's one dedicated group! It would be very easy for bats to be forgotten during times of crisis, but obviously not in Toronto. Great story!!
They are going to have to hand feed them for months. It will be spring before they can be released. I wonder if they had denned in a hollow tree and that tree was one of the ones brought down in the ice storm.

Toronto Wildlife is a great group.
TorontoWildlifeCentre.com
I get their eNews letter with its great animal videos.
It's so good that they are helping these poor bats. I wonder what woke them from hibernation? I hope they will be able to get them to go back into hibernation again, so that they can wake up naturally in the spring.
They probably won't hibernate now. It is tricky to put animals like that into a hibernation state. It might be safer to just feed them until spring. Winter was really early this year anyhow so they have had some sleep time.

They don't know why they woke up, but it must be that something disturbed their hibernation site. We had massive amounts of tree damage because of the ice storm and then huge amounts of human activity to clean up the damage and restore power. We are having "ice quakes" I am not even sure what they are. Any or all of this could have disturbed them.

The good news is that most of them will make it through the winter.Smiley1
I wonder what Ice Quakes are....?
I am going to investigate that.

All we are getting here is water.....millions of gallons of the stuff. The fields are like lakes. Birds love it (though all they will catch there is floating worms) And dogs -out for walks -are loving it too. A little boy the other day was running his remote-controlled motor boat over one of the fields, and a dog was chasing it through the water.
It seems that there are frost quakes and ice quakes.

http://www.livescience.com/42419-what-is...line+Feed)

It all has to do with extreme cold and ice expanding. I remember as a kid in Manitoba, when it was really cold we would get loud bangs like that. We knew it was the cold so we did not worry about it. It seems that Ontario is going to learn about the cold effects.

I heard you had bad weather. I am glad it is just wet and not frozen wet. Your trees are not equipped to handle the frost like Canadian trees. If you had a canoe you could travel for miles in the rain water.
Sounds like you are having a really rough winter. What a good thing that group was on hand to save these bats.

Is this winter unusually cold for you?
Over here it is actually relatively mild, just very wet and windy. Each storm itself is not too unusual, it's the quick succession that is causing the problems. The water table hasn't time to return to normal levels before the next storm rolls in. That and the lunacy of building houses on flood plains!! Will housing planners never learn!
We are having a bad winter. We had a severe ice storm and we have not really cleaned up from that and then we have had a severe cold spell with lots of snow. Now we are having a fast thaw which means there could be flooding. I still haven't cleaned up the damaged wood from the ice storm.

They have more bats at the rescue now. It must be the weather that has disturbed so many. It looks like they will save them all, but it is a lot of work and a lot of meal worms.