Back Up from "Down Under"

Well, I DID NOT getting eaten by a crocodile, or a shark, or bit by any venomous snakes or stung by killer jellyfish! How silly of me to have ever worried about that, but oh, it was FABULOUS! Now there are so many tales to tell from there, but keeping in mind you all have lives to lead, I shall keep this to one tale at a time. Let’s start with bats.

Who knew, surely I didn’t, that places like Cairns, noted as the jumping off spot for the Great Barrier Reef and Sydney, famous for its Opera House, were also home to thousand and thousands of fruit bats! Driving from the airport to our hostel in Cairns the first thing I spotted, well to be truthful the very first thing I spotted was, yeah, a Willy Wagtail, but right after that, a huge bat went winging overhead.
A three-foot across, mega bat, a Spectacled Flying Fox, one of thousands that roost in the rainforest but disperse at dusk to the many fruit trees in Cairns.
It was just wild, to have them flump, flump, flump right into a tree over our head, hang upside down and start eating the nectar from huge blossoms. I loved it! They are important pollinators of the rainforest trees and great dispersers of seeds, for they can easily travel 60 miles a day. That’s far more than the flitting of a butterfly or beeline of a bee so they are invaluable in pollinating trees that are separated by distance.

Check out this picture and see what great faces they have. The name Spectacled comes from the fact that the light fur around their eyes looks like glasses. And they look right at you.
As fruit bats they have excellent eyes, no need to use sonar to find a mango after all, so they don’t have the small eyes and oversized ears of the insect eating bats that use echolocation. And the way they move through the trees using the claw on their wing like a hand makes them seem more like monkeys than bats.

In Sydney we toured the Botanical Gardens, and hanging in the trees by the hundreds were Gray Headed Flying Fox bats, another fruit eater with a wingspan approaching three feet.
Amazing! Each tree had hundreds, for what they say is a total of 22,000 in the park! And their numbers are down by 30% over the last 10 years, can you imagine when they were at full strength what this would have looked like! We saw them by day, then at sunset they unfurl, and head out over the city in a huge stream of bats that looks like a scene out of the Wizard of Oz.
They were streaming their way to Centennial Park where they will dine on Eucalypts and Banksia trees through the night.
Again, no one had prepared me for this and it was such an amazing sight. In a city no less.


Now, the Botanical Gardens are none to happy about them choosing their sight, for the trees take a bit of a beating, and there are plans underway to start playing jack hammer sounds through the night to discourage them from camping there. It worked in Melbourne but bats have been calling this place home since the late 1800’s so they may be harder to talk into a new neighborhood. Habitat destruction in other areas it what leads them to this one steady source of trees. Again, their contribution as pollinators is one not to be eliminated, so hopefully they will find a place to relocate and not have their numbers further reduced. They say they can pass some 60,000 seeds through their system in one night and I would believe that, standing under trees where the ground was completely covered with tightly packed seeds from their dining. Wow, and I thought our roosts of winter robins were something to get excited about! So, what a bonus.

I expected fabulous reef fish in Cairns and found them, and the Opera House in Sydney was the imposing icon I thought it would be, but cities that rivaled Gotham in their night bat flights was completely unexpected and delightful. Indeed the whole trip was a naturalists dream, but, as I promised, one topic at a time. Parrots, by the thousands, in the trees and in the water will wait for another day.