While walking in Sydney's botanical gardens, we saw these big colonies of bats hanging in the trees.
The grey-headed flying fox, a large Australian bat that feeds on fruit and nectar, has established permanent "camps" in Sydney's botanical gardens. The thousands of flying foxes living year-round in the oldest groves in the gardens are stripping leaves and breaking branches, damaging—and even killing—some of the trees.
The bats camp in the trees; during the day up to 9,000 of them can be seen hanging upside down on branches like some sort of bizarre hairy screeching fruit. At dusk they stream out of the gardens by the thousands to feed on fruit trees and eucalyptus flowers throughout the city's suburbs. We only saw them during the day, but some were always flying around.
We got some pretty scary pictures of them.
The grey-headed flying fox, a large Australian bat that feeds on fruit and nectar, has established permanent "camps" in Sydney's botanical gardens. The thousands of flying foxes living year-round in the oldest groves in the gardens are stripping leaves and breaking branches, damaging—and even killing—some of the trees.
The bats camp in the trees; during the day up to 9,000 of them can be seen hanging upside down on branches like some sort of bizarre hairy screeching fruit. At dusk they stream out of the gardens by the thousands to feed on fruit trees and eucalyptus flowers throughout the city's suburbs. We only saw them during the day, but some were always flying around.
We got some pretty scary pictures of them.
They were so fuzzy looking when they were hanging in the trees. I guess they are quite a problem for the gardens since they keep eating the trees and flowers. Sydney garden officials have tried a variety of innovative methods to protect both the bats and the trees. They have installed "wailers"—suspended speakers playing loud noises—hung smelly substances such as rotten meat, prawns, and chili peppers on the trees; smeared the branches with python dung; and used water sprinklers to deter the bats. So far none of the techniques has shown much success; the bats seem to be more curious than scared. 
No comments:
Post a Comment