Mrs Winkie is an adult female Grey-Headed Flying-Fox who was noticed by some walkers, tangled in netting in the gutter beside a quiet road.
It makes my blood boil when I get this kind of rescue, because it means someone has cut them out of the netting in their tree and thrown them over the fence, expecting them to untangle themselves and fly off, or die without inconveniencing themselves.
All they have to do is to call wildlife rescue and someone will come and do this safely for the bat and the MOP, and most likely will offer them free netting to replace their crappy stuff.
This was worse than normal large aperture netting; this was monofilament netting, which I generally call slice and dice netting. The single fine strands of nylon fishing line thickness cut the bats membrane and mouth as they attempt to free themselves by biting on the netting.
There are still a few discount garden and hardware stores who sell this death netting and will continue to do so because it's cheap.
When I arrived, the poor girl was in the gutter, swathed in the netting with no hope of freeing herself. It took me 25 minutes to free her from the netting with scissors and hands with opposable thumbs; what chance did she have with just teeth and a mouth muzzled by netting.
The lovely MOPs (members of public) who found her, stayed and helped, and videoed for me when my video glasses, who had apparently been freelancing in my car, recording the ceiling view and other delights and flattening the battery, died a few minutes into the rescue. (That was quite a sentence wasn't it? Hope it makes sense)
For a while, Mrs Winkie was called Mrs Monumentally Cranky Pants, which isn't obvious in this video but comes to the fore in the next instalment of her time with me.
I was going to call her Winkurri, but one of the neighbours shortened it to Winkie which seemed to fit her well.
I have moved Mrs Winkie along to a carer along with Gertie, and I hear that while her wings are in the process of blistering and falling apart, she is doing better than expected.
I also hear that she's a sweet girl, passive and cooperative, which makes my heart glad that she's settled down and isn't so stressed.
Hang in their Mrs Winkie. If the world was the faintest bit fair you wouldn't be in this situation.
Update: Mrs Winkie is doing really well and is on track for release in the next release cycle. Her injuries are comparatively minimal considering the horrible netting and her entanglement.
She was saved by the thickness of the netting and that she didn't have single strand tight entanglements around her wing membrane.
I love happy outcomes.
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