Batgirl lives in Ballykelly, Co Antrim

Bats, of the large black rubber variety, are a familiar Halloween decoration, but Karen Healy has no need of the fake kind: she has the real, live thing. The Co Derry woman has turned her Ballykelly home into a refuge for injured bats, and they’re absolutely everywhere. There’s one in a box beside the fridge in the kitchen, awaiting release, another in the living room and seven more upstairs in the spare room – otherwise known as the batcave.

Healy answers the door with a young pipistrelle bat, Angelica, nestled comfortably against her chest. She talks to Angelica softly as the tiny creature clings to her cardigan, manoeuvring around with the help of its hooked thumb claws. Up close, Angelica looks for all the world like a small winged mouse, but that’s not a comparison that Healy appreciates.

“Ugh, no, I don’t like mice, or rats, or insects of any kind. Definitely not.” She shudders. “I was doing the Halloween decorations the other day and I saw something dark scoot under the sofa, and I thought, Oh God, it’s a massive spider. But it was actually just a bat that had escaped from upstairs. All they need is a quarter-inch gap and they’re away. You’d find one hanging from the curtains, another in the bath plug. They’re master escape artists.”

Healy’s life with bats is, by her own admission, rather chaotic. As a volunteer with the Northern Ireland Bat Group, she is trained to respond to emergency calls from members of the public who find grounded or injured bats. And this year has been intensely demanding.

“There hasn’t been a day since April that I haven’t had a bat call,” says Healy, adding that the group as a whole has received 400 alerts over the last four months. “At one point I had 19 bats in the house. My partner, Simon, helps out too, but our evenings are non-existent. We haven’t been to the cinema in months. Between rescuing the bats, medicating them, feeding them, grooming them and then releasing them, you just don’t get a moment to yourself.”

Healy, who is employed as an environmental officer at Creggan Country Park in Derry is on duty even when she’s at work. “The helpline comes through to me there during office hours, and then it goes to my mobile when I go home; that’s usually when the madness begins.”

The wet, windy conditions over the summer hit young bats, in particular, very hard. Many were abandoned because the mothers were unable to get enough food to make milk for them. Underfed, grounded and weak, the bat pups are more likely to fall prey to their biggest enemy other than bad weather: cats.

“Cat attacks do a lot of damage. You get bats with compound fractures, shoulder bones protruding, wings missing. Most of the time, you end up having to put them down, and I do find that very difficult.”

Strange haunts

Bats have a habit of turning up in the strangest places. Healy has rescued them from wood-burning stoves and from inside vases; one was stuck to a piece of fly-paper, and another was hiding behind a holy picture in a chapel. Yet another was discovered struggling in a bucket of cooking oil outside a Chinese restaurant. “It took me two weeks to get the oil off him,” says Healy grimly. It’s also not uncommon for bats to end up tangled in clothes on washing lines, thus finding their way into the house. In one recent case in England, a woman discovered a bat nestled in her bra as she was putting it on.

Especially when caring for the youngest animals, an almost maternal devotion is required. Angelica is now four months old and doing well, but when Healy first took her in she was barely an inch long and very fragile. Every two hours for the first two months, Healy dripped puppy milk into the bat’s tiny jaws using an artist’s fine paintbrush. She even had to take Angelica with her when she went for a spa weekend in Sligo, nipping out between massages and facial treatments to feed the baby.

Not for the squeamish

It’s not a job for the squeamish. Once the pups are weaned, they move on to eating live mealworms, to replace the 3,000 midges they would consume every night in the wild. To ensure sufficient supply, Healy raises the worms herself, feeding them a rich diet full of fat and protein so her bats, in turn, get all the nutrition they need. At first, the pups need a little help – the mealworm’s head is snipped off so the bat can feast on the juicy innards – but later they graduate to crunching the worms up whole. Each bat will eat 20-40 worms every night.

Evenings are given over to flying practice. Healy won’t release a bat back into the wild until she has seen it do at least 10 minutes’ solid flying around her living room, so she knows it can cope.

It’s clear that Lucky, a Leisler’s bat, hasn’t been going easy on the mealworms. With a leonine ruff of rich brown hair, enormous ears and a set of spiky white teeth that would do serious damage to his natural prey, he’s in prime condition.

“I call him the Hulk,” laughs Healy. “He’s a bruiser. But when I took him in, he was really skinny, he had a big parasite load and his wing was completely torn in half. It’s taken a long time to build him up.”

Lucky closes his tiny eyes in bliss as Healy rubs him gently on the snout, above his nose. “They’re just like dogs,” she says. “They like to be stroked, and they’re smart too; as soon as Angelica sees me coming, she goes over to wait beside her feeding bowl for dinner to arrive.”

Unfazed Nanook

Healy’s real dog, Nanook, is unfazed by the presence of the wild creatures in her home. “One night, a bat got out in the car when we were taking it to be released. Nanook was with us, and the bat landed on her back. Nanook just peered round at it. She wasn’t a bit bothered.”

Of course, the moment of release is the culmination of all Healy’s devoted care. Especially for female bats, it’s vital that they are returned to the exact spot they were first found, because they could be part of a maternity colony (a large group of females who join together to rear their young) and may even have a pup in the roost.

It’s a bitter-sweet experience for Healy. “I miss them when they go,” she says. “It’s wild hard, and I do shed a few tears. But it feels good too. It’s the right thing for them.”

Snug in Healy’s gloved hand, Lucky begins to emit a series of sharp metallic clicks. “I think he’s getting hungry,” sighs Healey. “I can’t wait for November.”

Why, what happens then?

“That’s when the bats go into hibernation. They go to sleep and I get my life back. Until it starts all over again in the spring.”