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Holy flying hitchhiker! Bat enters car, bites girl

By EMILY ANTHES
Published August 2, 2005

	[Photos courtesy of Shields family]
	Teresa Shields holds the bat and spreads her fingers to show where she was bitten.
	The no longer nasty bat.

SEMINOLE - Teresa Shields was driving home Friday night when something small and dark flew through her car window and landed in the back seat.

Shields, 17, reached back and wrapped her hand around the object.

Then it hissed, spread its wings and bit her.

"Oh my god!" she thought. "It's a bat!"

Shields dropped the creature and called her mom. When she pulled up to her Seminole house minutes later, her parents were standing outside with flashlights and brooms, ready to confront the marauder.

"As we were catching it, it did sort of rear its ugly head," said Stephen Shields, Teresa's father. "I saw its teeth - they looked pretty prominent."

He said the bat was the size of a small rat.

The elder Shields, a doctor of internal medicine, said his daughter had two red marks and some tenderness, but the bite had not broken the skin.

Some bats carry rabies, but the disease is no more common in bats than it is in any other mammal, said Gary Morse, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Stephen Shields said he was reassured that the bat bit Teresa only after she had picked it up. "This was provoked," he said. "It wasn't foaming at the mouth attacking her."

Still, the Shields are having the bat tested for rabies just in case.

"It was weird, scary at first," she said. "But give it a few hours and it was hilarious."

Her family and friends think so, too. When her family returned from a day trip to Sea World on Saturday, they had a present for her: a Batman T-shirt.

"They call me Batgirl," she said.

[Last modified August 2, 2005, 02:45:17]