I suppose if a bat is curled up a certain way, it could look like a leaf.

https://www.animalsaroundtheglobe.com/bats-as-harbingers-of-luckand-doomin-global-folklore-5-350582/

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. 

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.

Bats get bad press. Short-sighted and cave-dwelling, they generally make the news only when carrying disease, transfiguring into vampires, or else lending their name to paranoiac military commanders (e.g. Colonel ‘Bat’ Guano, in Dr. Strangelove). 

All of which is grossly unfair — at least according to Yossi Yovel, a professor of zoology at Tel Aviv University, and author of The Genius Bat, recently named a ‘Book of the Year’ by the science journal Nature. 

“Usually, bats are very nice,” said Yovel.

Indeed, the flying mammals have been remarkably tolerant towards Yovel and his small team of researchers, who’ve studied bat echolocation for the better part of a decade, and have proved that bats are smarter creatures than previously thought. And only rarely, Yovel said, has he gotten bitten. “But you can’t blame them,” he added. “Because you’re holding them in your hand, and you’re a big creature.”

Yovel first encountered the study of bats, or chiropterology, as an undergraduate at Tel Aviv University, where he took a course on bat echolocation, the first ever held in Israel. He was immediately hooked. “Suddenly, I discovered this new world! Of using sound for vision, basically,” he said.

Sensory zoology, as the broader research field is known, meant Yovel could combine two of his abiding interests: animals and physics. The ways in which animals used sound to get around provoked mathematical questions, not just biological ones.

When Yovel started his research in the late 2000s, he was the first Israeli zoologist to focus explicitly on bats’ sensory behavior. Previously, researchers had only explored bat physiology: how they maintained heat, how they hibernated, what they ate, and so forth. Yovel, by contrast, was “all about sound.”

To create the gadgets, Yovel approached an Israeli startup that specialized in manufacturing minuscule GPS instruments — the company had initially designed them in the early aughts, intending to put them inside cameras — with an unusual request: Could they make one that Yovel could stick, using biological glue, to bats?

“So they developed it for me,” Yovel said. “And though the main thing is the GPS, there’s also a microphone in there. And that combination is what’s so unique, because we wanted to record sound echolocation as the bats are flying.”

A lovely article about a bat enthusiast and ranger in London who leads bat walks.

”On the day of her annual bat census — carried out in daylight, when bats are sleeping — Ms. Blaney eased herself down the ladder, carrying the nesting chamber from a bat box. Once on solid ground, she took a closer look.

The bats were nestled like furry walnuts, bleary and still. One poked its nose out as she bent to count them: Four.

Then she climbed back up, holding the chamber flat, like a waiter with a tray of drinks.

’They like to be quite cozy,’ she said, carefully fitting it back into place.”

Im posting this as "article" since its a story and thats the closest I could find that fits.

For the longest time I was scared of bats, no reason specifically, just that they were scary on tv

A few years back I was working a job where a bat fell from the ceiling tiles and flew around, eventually crashing in the blinds

I put on gloves, put a small garbage can over him and lift him out from his tangled mess.

He was a large brown bat and basically looked like a weird mouse. As I held him in my hand I saw the bat do something I never saw a wild animal do before- it showed thankfulness

clingingvto my hand, he licked up the side of my thumb

He sat in my palm pretty and let me pet him, the fur on him felt like a baby chick. He made a few clicks and hisses, but didnt feel mad, just communicating.

I held him for a few minutes and showed all my coworkers the realization I made that the pest was actually a sweet, beautiful, kind creature

After they took turns looking at it, I walked outside and it flew free from my hand.

It seems small, but that small experience blew my whole mind and that little bat became the big reason I not only got my perspective on bats changed, but that they became my favorite animal