Batty batty goodness

Nothing up my left sleeve...nothing up my right sleeve....

It’s not just the Quolls pulling the nocturnal naughties. Lately we’ve had a power cut every night. The culprits? Fruit bats. Personally I suspect the bat and Quolls are acting in concert: the Quolls wait till the lights go off and then sneak into the henhouse while the Girls are tripping over each other looking for the candles….

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Fruit Bats going beserk over the Gum blossom across the road from our house. I didn’t realise, at the time, how unusual this was. There’s never been a bat colony this far south in the Eurobodalla Shire before. In the past, our gum trees have blossomed largely unmolested. And then a couple of months ago, our trees were visited upon by hundreds of thousands of bats.

For weeks we marvelled at their number - thousands - flying overhead at dusk on their way to munch the trees in the bush beside the river. We wondered where they had come from. And then, a couple of weeks ago, we went to a garage sale five minutes from here. The winding suburban street is skirted by a small wetland. And there, right beside the trampolines and Pajeros, was the biggest bat colony I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been to Queensland. Every branch was utterly festooned with them, the entire Casuarina grove looked like it had had bats applied to it with an enormous spraygun. It was ten in the morning and the noise was deafening.

The bats aren’t doing much in the line of community relations; bat shit is fairly corrosive and they’re not shy about spreading it around. And then there’s the power cuts; a few days we got a letter from CountryEnergy apologising for all the interruptions. It seems they’ve had one or two phone calls. And there’s nothing sadder than watching the man with the Long Hooky Pole prodding a dilapidated, three day old bat carcass out of the power lines. The wet-sounding thud when it hits the ground is Kafka-esque.

Fruit bats live in colonies. And once they’ve found a good spot for a colony they settle in, returning each year to the exact same location to drink themselves silly on nectar and hang out with their fruitbat mates. This is why they do so well in Southern Queensland.

Perhaps the thing I find most surprising though, is that, for all the pissing and moaning, no one has mentioned the only real concern with bats; they are famous for their ability to spread zoonotic viruses, (which can be transmitted between humans and other animals). In this age of hysteria over Swine flu, it’s worth considering that bats are routinely fingered as the vector for outbreaks of emerging, deadly diseases, albeit in places the western media doesn't care about – like villages in south east Asia. Normally these illnesses require an intermediary animal – such as the Hendra virus (horses), before they can spread to humans. It’s a very small risk but that never stopped a good story, and I guess I’m surprised the press hasn’t seized on the opportunity for some just-add-facemasks hysteria.

It seems though, that the bat-feasting is coming to an end. The flocks of bats that were making their nightly pilgramage over our roof have thinned significantly. Until next year.