They took a few minutes to emerge from their sleeping nooks, but the moment the ruwenzori longhaired fruit bats started swooping back and forth in their Franklin Park Zoo habitat Saturday morning, 8-year-old Miriam Parrucci lit up.

Miri, a third-grader from Havertown, Pa., has loved bats since her mother read her “Stellaluna,” a book about a bat who raised by birds, when she was a year old.