You often hear of weird and wonderful creatures arriving with shipments of produce. Sometimes they aren’t discovered until the consumer takes it home and unwraps it.
Usually it’s a spider that has made its way from a more tropical climate with a shipment of fruit.
But staff at a grocery store in Australia found something quite unexpected in a delivery of house plants.
They were so unsure as to what to do they had to call in the experts.
The supermarket staff were unpacking the delivery of plants when they noticed something brown moving around.
On a closer inspection they discovered it was a bat, still moving but very confused.
Somehow, the bat, called Benjamin, must have fallen into the plant just before it was wrapped in plastic.
The warehouse, where the plants were packaged, had a colony of bats living in the roof.
Staff were unsure how to respond and so called in expert bat rescuer and rehabber Denise Wade who took the plant and little trapped bat away.
“Well, here’s something you don’t see every day,” Denise Wade, owner of Batzilla the Bat, said in a video she posted on Facebook.
Fortunately, freeing the bat was as simple as removing the plastic and lifting out the confused little creature.
“As he was in a very good condition, we believe he had probably only gone into the sleeve that morning,” Denise told The Dodo .
Denise gave him to a microbat carer and was happy to report that he was reunited with his colony just a few days later.
“Benjamin is an adult male and because he was uninjured, he was kept in care for three days under observation just to make sure everything was OK, before being taken back to his home and reunited with his family in the roof,” Denise told The Dodo.
Staff at the warehouse are also more vigilant when it comes to spotting little critters that may drop down from the roof.
Plastic can be a death trap for animals both on land and in the sea. We’re so happy that little Benjamin could be saved but other animals may not be so fortunate.
Please share this article to alert your friends to the dangers of plastic.
