This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Australia is famously a place with some of the world’s most dangerous and frightening animals. Venomous spiders. Deadly snakes. Jellyfish with fatal stings.

But it is also home to one of the world’s cutest: the flying fox, also known as the giant fruit bat. I mean, look at this animal.

This is a baby bat taking a bubble bath. If it doesn’t melt your heart, nothing will.

In northeastern Australia, not far from the coastal city of Cairns, is a place called Tolga Bat Hospital. It is, as its name suggests, a hospital for bats—one of the only such facilities on the planet. And it’s also one of the few places you can see a baby bat getting a bubble bath.

The hospital, which has just one full-time paid employee but a cadre of volunteers, has been treating bats for more than 30 years. It comprises a few small buildings with treatment rooms, cold storage for fruit, and a nursery for orphan bats, as well as several outdoor wire enclosures. The largest cage is akin to a long-term care facility; it’s for bats that can no longer fly and will live out their lives at the hospital.

Tolga Bat Hospital cares for as many as 1,000 bats a year, the bulk of which are spectacled flying foxes, an endangered species and one of four distinct kinds of flying foxes in mainland Australia. They come in with disease, heat stress, or injuries from barbed wire. The hospital also cares for hundreds of baby spectacleds—named for the lighter fur around their eyes that makes it look like they’re wearing glasses—that have lost their mothers and can’t survive on their own.

On a warm afternoon in December, I visited the hospital with Australian photographer Harriet Spark. We met a lot of cute bats—and they were hard not to love. Flying foxes are furry with expressive eyes, large ears, and a dog-like snout. But it was the hospital founder........

© Mother Jones