Today is ‘kite flying day’ … so , as a twist, here is something about ‘flying ‘ creatures – flying foxes / bats.
Australia
Flying foxes are….. “intelligent and remarkable. These unique animals help regenerate our forests and keep ecosystems healthy through pollination and seed dispersal. They are a migratory and nomadic ‘keystone’ species; meaning a species that many other species of plants and animals rely upon for their survival and wellbeing. Flying foxes, like bees, help drive biodiversity, and faced with the threat of climate change, land clearing, and other human-caused ecological pressures, we need them more than ever.
Flying foxes are bats or, more accurately, mega-bats (big bats). They are commonly known as fruit bats, but their diet is predominately nectar, pollen, and fruit — in that order. They don’t use sonar like smaller, insect-eating bats; only their eyes and ears like us. They see as well as a cat at night and are just about as smart.
Subject to changes in season and food availability, Ipswich is home to between four and ten flying fox camps. All are located in roosts found along natural or man-made water courses in urban, peri-urban and rural areas of the city.”
Flying fox colonies in Ipswich
The Woodend colony was previously one the largest colonies in South East Queensland, at times hosting over 250,000 flying foxes. During the 1980s, the Camira colony had flying foxes in the hundreds of thousands. The majority of these two colonies originally came from Sapling Pocket, where one of the largest colonies in Queensland lived until continued disturbance dispersed the colony. Following degradation of roosting habitat at Woodend, a number of smaller local roosts emerged. There is now a scattering of small colonies around Ipswich, none of which reach the population sizes common in the 1980s.
A local neighbour actually had stories of flying foxes – often being not very well treated – including very near what is now Ipswich Hospital .
( source : https://www.animalsaustralia.org/issues/flying-foxes.php ; https://www.ipswich.qld.gov.au/live/animals/wildlife/flying_foxes )
New Zealand
Bats in the wild… bats in very real trouble… Forest & Bird has secured funding for a three-year project to learn more about critically endangered long-tailed bats in the top of the South Island.
It’s 7pm and it’s getting dark on the forested banks of the Buller River, in sleepy Murchison. We are sitting on rocks holding Batbox bat detectors that can pick up impossiblefor-humans-to-hear bat calls and transform them into a series of clicks as the bat flies in and out of range. A series of these audible clicks is defined as a “bat pass”.
This should be good bat country according to Debs Martin, former coordinator for Forest & Bird’s Bat Recovery Project. Debs shows us how to use the detectors, angling them towards where the bats are likely to fly along the forest edge by the river looking for insects to snack on.
Sadly, there were no bat passes for those of us who had gathered by the banks of the river in early summer in the hope of observing our first native bat in its natural habitat. We failed to see or even hear a single one during the evening. Maybe there are roosts in the nearby forests, and we were unlucky in not seeing their tiny occupants. Or perhaps the bats are locally extinct, another victim of New Zealand’s introduced predators – the rats, stoats, cats, possums, and wasps who come to feast on the adults and young pups defenceless in their roosts each breeding season.
For 10 years, Forest & Bird has been leading work on the conservation of critically endangered long-tailed bats in the top of the South Island. In 2008, we emsurveyingployed Dr Brian Lloyd to look for significant bat populations, and he spent five years Marlborough, Nelson, Tasman, and the West Coast. Despite checking many places, he found only three sites with reasonable numbers of long-tailed bats – one on D’Urville Island, another near the Mokihinui River, and a third at Pelorus Bridge/Titiraukawa, a 200ha scenic reserve in Marlborough, which became home to Forest & Bird’s Bat Recovery Project.
Bats are New Zealand’s only native land mammal. There are two species – the short-tailed and the long-tailed bat – neither of which is found anywhere else in the world. Both are as threatened as kiwi, locally extinct in parts of both the North and South Islands, and yet they don’t get anywhere near as much protection, resources, or research as some of our more charismatic species. “
( https://www.forestandbird.org.nz/resources/better-bats )
More at Department of Conservation NZ bat pages
