The North Carolina Zoo Has Vampire Bats

A visit to the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, North Carolina, is a great experience. The zoo houses over 1,000 animals, and inside a cool little house for nocturnal animals in the Sonoran Desert pavilion that is also home to the cacomistle and coati, there is a display of vampire bats, Since these critters are more active at night, their display is kept fairly dark, but you can see them flying back and forth within the enclosure once your eyes have adjusted. They are normally flying to their feeders and back, so once you locate the feeders within the enclosure, you can usually find some activity.

Of course, this activity swells to a crescendo at feeding time, which the zoo does during visiting hours so that visitors can see it. As you could guess from the name, vampire bats drink blood. They usually take their meal from a living animal, such as a cow or pig, using a special anticoagulant in their saliva to keep the blood from clotting once it starts to flow from a bite of their tiny fangs, but of course at the North Carolina Zoo, the bats aren't given live prey. The zoo staff feeds the bats by pouring cows' blood (with an added coagulant) into, of all things, hummingbird feeders for the bats to dine upon. The North Carolina Zoo goes through 18 pounds of cows' blood a week to feed the bats! It doesn't sound like the most fun job in the world to pour smelly cows' blood into several feeders in a dark box with bats flying around your head, but I guess they are used to it!

Here's another post about the North Carolina Zoo, for your enjoyment: http://whatsgoodingreensboro.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-funny-thing-happened-at-zoo-and-i.html

You can also find What's Good in Greensbroro? on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Whats-Good-in-Greensboro-848569635208317/ . See you there!

Vampire bat picture from Wikimedia Commons en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Desmodus.jpg