Bairnsdale
If you are driving north towards NSW, Bairnesdale is the kind of place you only stop for BCF - boating, fishing and camping supplies. It's a relatively large town, so not a place you'd want to stay the night if you were after peace and quiet.
However, we had to stop for a few hours here as we had an issue with our deep cycle battery and needed the guys at Super Cheap Auto to take a look at it for us.
Whilst we waited for it to charge, we headed to the river to stumble upon a huge fruit bat colony - thousands of beautiful grey and orange furred fruit bats swinging from the gums, silky oaks and plane trees, cacophonic in their squawking. There are about 20,000 of them here and you cannot miss them. Specific to Australia, these are grey haired flying foxes and you'd be crazy to drive through town without bothering to see these hugely important forest pollinators. I'm just sorry my camera didn't do them justice.
Sadly, we risk losing them. Some 100,000 bats died last year in hot weather and bushfires, and farmers can shoot them when they land on crops, having been pushed out of forests. There is a perception that they are diseased, too. It's worth going to spend money in Bairnesdale but TELL people you are here just for the bats - the tourist dollar is valuable and it could make people want to protect them more.
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They are very interesting! Do they choose to sleep in the trees because there are no caves, or is it just their preference? Thanks for sharing! Take care!
Haven´t been there, but we´ve been to Casino beginning of this year and it looks the same. ten thousands of flying foxes. But the locals there seem to hate them as it is out of control.
We used to have a large little brown bat colony in our barn. They have been decimated by white nose disease, but a couple dozen still comeback each year.
I don't think I've ever seen a real bat before🤔, they look so weird especially so many of them hanging off the tree together
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I've only ever encountered bats hanging out like this on trees a few times in my life. So cool to see them during daylight hours. In Cambodia, there was a place with a cave you could go at sunset to watch batch stream out of a hole in the rock, quite a sight to behold. These bats look cute enough as long as they keep their paws off my fruit. !tan
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Oh yes, that's the problem here too - farmers will shoot them to keep them off the crops, not really thinking or caring about their benefit to the environment!
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Oh yes, I've seen them in Malaysia too! Or some kind of bats, maybe not these ones as they are native to Australia and I don't think you find this exact species anywhere else. They are noisy, aren't they?