Bat.

So I feel like this morning needs to be documented because it was ridiculous.

I was heading down to the lab to go check primers for an experiment I’m running later, and stopped at my undergrad’s office to chat for a few minutes. M walks in, wearing a skirt that bore a startling resemblance to my parents’ last couch, and looks at us with one of her funny faces conveying disbelief. I waved hello and then she walks up to the office and says "What am I going to do with this?" Cupped in her little hands is a tiny, tiny bat. She tells us how she found it on the ground in the parking garage and it looked like the cold was getting to it, so she picked it up and carried inside. Now, of course, after being held in a human’s 98.6 degree hand along with being inside a heated building, the bat started to come to, and began making a loud screaming/chirping noise, and moved around a little. She walked down the hall and showed one of the other students going on about how she didn’t know what to do with it. It then started "grabbing her finger" , so T and I went downstairs to find a box for it. When we came up, the bat was comfortable hanging upside down from the inside of M’s cupped hands. Her husband, M2 was downstairs when we went to find the box and he responded with "I told her it would wake up. Now it’s going to poop everywhere." We laughed all the way back upstairs, and then made it a "home" in one of our styrofoam boxes. It now has air holes, torn paper towels as bedding and both a pen and a pencil to perch from if it so chooses. Apparently, it’s sleeping on the bottom of the box.

The verdict? M and M both decided they are going to put it in their garage when they get home, so then it’s semi-protected from the "cold" and they can let it out if it starts flying around. I’m still voting for the vet option.

And now I have no motivation to actually get anything done today. I guess I should go look at those primers.