Bats**t Crazy

Since April 11,000 human residents of the tourist town of Batemans Bay on the southeast coast of Australia have been coping with an inundation of 140,000 bats, the grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus), Australia largest bat.  The bats have been returning to Batemans Bay at this time of year since 2012, roosting in large trees in a local nature preserve and adjacent golf course. 

The houses are covered in guano and those who venture outside soon feel a disgusting “sprinkle of something”.

Then there’s the early-morning screeching, so excruciating that resident Danielle Smith said it compelled her to go on anti-depressants.

Her two-year-old can no longer play in the backyard and “won’t even sleep in his own bed anymore because he’s so frightened of the bats”, she said.

“I can’t open my window at all because the smell is so bad,” Smith said. “We can actually taste it — that’s how strong it is.”

Flying foxes are not migratory, but they do travel across their Southeastern Australian coastal range. The foxes are fruit eater, preferring to forage at night in the forest.  Their travels are forage driven as they follow their food supply.

This year’s Batemans Bay colony is nearly triple the size of the colonies in previous years.  The increase in colony size isn’t due to an increase in overall flying fox numbers, which have decreased by 30% since 1990.  In fact, what it represent is a decrease in flying fox habitat.  Australia is a world leader in deforestation, aggressive cutting down native forest in the entire range of the flying fox.  As the fox bats territory is reduced colonies cluster together to take advantage of the available resources.  

“It’s an unprecedented event because we’re in uncharted territory with how to manage it,” the mayor, Lindsay Brown, said.

Government science agency, the CSIRO, estimates there are 680,000 grey-headed flying foxes in Australia, meaning Batemans Bay has been home to one in five of them. Each bat can weigh a kilogram with wing spans exceeding a metre.

They fly out at dusk to feed on flowering spotted gum and bloodwood trees in forests, then wake locals with a cacophony of screeching on their return to town before dawn.

Thousands fly en masse into power lines, knocking out power to the entire town. This happened not just once but on nine consecutive nights in April.

Batemans Bay will survive its annual flying fox visit, although plans are in place to cut down trees to create a buffer zone for the town.  Unfortunately, it was the cutting down of trees that have led to this situation in the first place.

Bat colonies in Australian urban areas have become increasingly common since the 1990s, Sydney University bat researcher Kerryn Parry-Jones said.

“We have … an ecological problem which has been generated over probably 50 years, and it’s only now people are becoming aware of it,” she said. “And now they want a complete and utter solution within 24 hours.”

 Yes, Australia, you have a problem.