{"id":463901,"date":"2026-02-12T09:20:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T09:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/463901\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T09:20:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T09:20:14","slug":"one-of-a-kind-hospital-saves-hundreds-of-lives-a-year-caring-for-most-adorable-babies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/463901\/","title":{"rendered":"One-Of-A-Kind Hospital Saves Hundreds Of Lives A Year Caring for Most Adorable Babies"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story<\/a> was originally published at Vox.com<\/a> and is reproduced here with permission.<\/p>\n

Australia is famously a place with some of the world\u2019s most dangerous and frightening animals. Venomous spiders. Deadly snakes. Jellyfish with fatal stings.<\/p>\n

But it is also home to one of the world\u2019s cutest: the flying fox, also known as the giant fruit bat.<\/p>\n

\"BabyHarriet Spark<\/p>\n

In northeastern Australia, not far from the coastal city of Cairns, is a place called Tolga Bat Hospital<\/a>. It is, as its name suggests, a hospital for bats \u2014 one of the only such facilities on the planet.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s also one of the few places you can see a baby bat getting a bubble bath.<\/p>\n

\"BabyHarriet Spark<\/p>\n

The hospital, which has just one full-time paid employee but a cadre of volunteers, has been treating bats for more than 30 years. It comprises a few small buildings with treatment rooms, cold storage for fruit, and a nursery for orphan bats, as well as several outdoor wire enclosures. The largest cage is akin to a long-term care facility; it\u2019s for bats who can no longer fly and will live out their lives at the hospital.<\/p>\n

Harriet Spark<\/p>\n

Tolga Bat Hospital cares for as many as 1,000 bats a year, the bulk of which are spectacled flying foxes, an endangered species and one of four distinct kinds of flying foxes in mainland Australia. They come in with disease, heat stress or injuries from barbed wire. The hospital also cares for hundreds of baby spectacleds \u2014 named for the lighter fur around their eyes that makes it look like they\u2019re wearing glasses \u2014 who have lost their mothers and can\u2019t survive on their own.<\/p>\n

Harriet Spark<\/p>\n

On a warm afternoon in December, I visited the hospital with Australian photographer Harriet Spark. We met a lot of cute bats \u2014 and they were hard not to love. Flying foxes are furry with expressive eyes, large ears and a dog-like snout. But it was the hospital founder and director, Jenny Mclean, whom I found even more endearing.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou meet a bat, and they\u2019re worth caring about,\u201d Mclean, 71, told me that afternoon, as she fed a sick adult bat fruit juice from a syringe. \u201cThey have serious threats that they\u2019re facing, all of them human-induced.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JennyHarriet Spark<\/p>\n

Mclean, who works around the clock at the hospital and doesn\u2019t pay herself, said she feels a responsibility to help these creatures \u2014 not only because they\u2019re suffering at our expense but because they help keep our planet healthy. Flying foxes are exceptionally good at pollinating plants and\u00a0dispersing their seeds<\/a>, Mclean said.<\/p>\n

Giving back to these animals in some way, she said, is the least we can do.<\/p>\n

\"BabyHarriet Spark<\/p>\n

The nursery is a small, two-story building with a verandah that looks out onto the lush grounds of the hospital. Most of the babies were outside when we visited, hanging with their feet on several mesh metal shelves. Spectacled flying foxes are enormous: These animals were about 2 months old and already football-sized. By the time they grow up, their wingspan could reach more than 3 feet.<\/p>\n

The bats, still too young to fly, hung upside down, wrapped in their own wings, alongside stuffed animals. The stuffies, which Mclean buys from a local secondhand store, are meant to mimic mother bats, and the babies will often cling to them for comfort, Mclean told me. Some of the bats were drinking from bottles of flying fox formula attached to the shelves.<\/p>\n

\"OrphanedHarriet Spark<\/p>\n

Even younger bats were in a room inside the building. Infants under one week are kept in an incubator because they have trouble regulating their body temperature. Slightly older babies are kept in plastic boxes with heating pads and socks that they can cling to. For feeding, \u201cbox babies\u201d are swaddled in cloth around a small rectangular pillow so their wings are contained \u2014 forming baby bat burritos. A few had silicon pacifiers in their mouths.<\/p>\n

\"BabyHarriet Spark<\/p>\n

Nearly all of these orphans lost their moms to Australian paralysis ticks: parasites that carry a potent neurotoxin in their saliva. When paralysis ticks bite bats and other animals without natural immunity,\u00a0such as pet cats and dogs<\/a>, the insects can, as their name suggests, cause paralysis and, eventually, heart failure.<\/p>\n

During tick season, which typically runs from October to December, hospital workers search the ground below colonies, or \u201ccamps,\u201d for infected bats, who often fall out of trees. If the infection is mild, workers treat the animal with an anti-toxin at the hospital. The babies, meanwhile, are often spared from paralysis. Mothers likely pick up ticks while they\u2019re foraging without their young, Mclean said, and the parasites latch on before they have a chance to crawl onto the babies. That leads to an abundance of orphans in need of care.<\/p>\n

\"OrphanHarriet Spark<\/p>\n

Paralysis ticks live\u00a0all across eastern Australia<\/a>, but they only seem to affect spectacled flying foxes in the Atherton Tablelands, where the hospital is located, Mclean told me. The reason is still a mystery. One explanation, Mclean said, is that spectacleds in this region\u00a0feed on the berries<\/a>\u00a0of an invasive shrub called wild tobacco, where they encounter the ticks. While the plant grows in other parts of Australia where both ticks and flying foxes are found, Mclean said, the moist climate of the Tablelands may make ticks more likely to venture out of the grass and into the branches of the invasive shrub. That\u2019s where the flying foxes feed.<\/p>\n

That afternoon, I followed Mclean into the main hospital building, where she treats adult bats with paralysis. Rows of small metal cages and cloth boxes sat on shelves along the wall. In some of the enclosures, large flying foxes hung calmly from the top, whereas in others, the animals \u2014 still facing the effects of paralysis \u2014 were lying down.<\/p>\n

Using a towel, Mclean gently grabbed one of the bats from her cage to see if she would eat. The animal was having trouble swallowing, Mclean told me, as she placed a syringe with apple and mango juice in her mouth. The bat took a few sips and then pulled her head away. Mclean moved her into a small plastic bin for plan B: seeing if the animal would eat a small piece of pear instead. The bat began to chew, but then spat it out. \u201cYou have not got a good swallow, my girl,\u201d Mclean said.<\/p>\n

Harriet Spark<\/p>\n

Tick paralysis is just one of the threats to Australia\u2019s flying foxes, many of which are getting worse. Little reds, another species, get tangled in barbed wire, causing tears in their wings. Spectacleds in the Tablelands, meanwhile, are increasingly born with\u00a0cleft palate syndrome<\/a>\u00a0(for reasons that are not yet clear), which makes it hard for them to feed. And more recently, severe heat waves\u00a0tied to climate change<\/a>\u00a0have decimated flying fox populations. In 2018, unrelenting heat killed about 23,000 spectacled flying foxes in Far North Queensland,\u00a0nearly a third<\/a>\u00a0of the entire population. Mclean says she received about 500 orphans that year from the heat wave alone.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, these animals lack support \u2014 they\u2019re \u201cmaligned,\u201d Mclean said \u2014 especially compared to koalas and other furry animals in Australia. \u201cThere are not that many people who will champion them,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n

Harriet Spark<\/p>\n

Bats have a bad rap, in part, because they can carry diseases. Flying foxes are no exception \u2014 in rare cases, they can carry Australian bat lyssavirus, a relative of rabies. What gets less attention is the fact that humans almost never contract a disease from flying foxes. \u201cWe get about a thousand sick and injured bats a year, and we get a lyssavirus bat once every three years,\u201d Mclean said. (Workers at Tolga Bat Hospital get vaccinated before handling bats as a safety precaution.)<\/p>\n

Harriet Spark<\/p>\n

Ultimately, flying foxes are not a real threat to humans, she said. Disproportionately, humans harm them. \u201cIt\u2019s this whole thing of, are we willing to share the planet or not?\u201d she said. \u201cIf you\u2019re not willing to share the planet, you are going to destroy the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

If flying foxes continue to disappear, so will essential services like pollination and seed dispersal that keep forests alive, Mclean told me. \u201cYou can\u2019t have a healthy person unless you\u2019ve got healthy wildlife and a healthy environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Senior<\/a>Senior Rescue Bat Melts Into The Happiest Puddle During His Special Spa Day\u201cHe fully relaxes …”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story was originally published at Vox.com and is reproduced here with permission. Australia is famously a place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[3192,1246,42635,216070,616,192,79,615,613,201,620],"class_list":{"0":"post-463901","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-animal-encounters","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-bats","11":"tag-benji-jones","12":"tag-daily-dodo","13":"tag-environment","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-standard","16":"tag-the-dodo","17":"tag-wildlife","18":"tag-wildlife-rescue"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}