Bats.
And when I say bats, I mean over 10,000 flying fox bats. They are so loud when you walk through the gardens; their smell is overpowering even the rose gardens. They are also killing the trees:
This tree is typical of 19 trees that have died because the bats are nesting in it; and this tree is one of 40+ where every branch is covered with sleeping, cleaning, preening, chattering bats. At night, you can see them taking off to hunt.
During the day, they roost in the Botanic Gardens. The city is going to have chase them out before their breeding season begins, which is quite soon. Poison isn't an option as the bats are needed to pollinate trees and flowers as well as control the insect population. But, when you have 10,000 bats, you certainly have one too many bats.The gardens also have wild cockatoos that let you get quite close as they dig for worms and bugs in the ground. I much prefer these guys-- they are prettier to look at and don't smell as bad.
1 comment:
The bats in the Botanic Gardens are grey headed flying foxes. They're fruit bats, not insectivorous microbats. And yes, they are important pollinators. They are also a species in decline, they're listed as vulnerable to extinction by the state of NSW and by the Commonwealth of Australia. The problem is that so much of their natural roosting and feeding habitat has been destroyed that they have to look for alternatives and those alternatives often bring them into urban areas. Current predictions are that they will be extinct in the wild sometime between 2070 and 2100. Yes they are creating problems in the Gardens but there has to be a balance found between protecting exotic/non-native and common plants and adding the recovery of a threatened native species of animal and shooing them out of the Gardens isn't a balanced option. The Royal Botanic Gardens colony is a very successful breeding colony, has access to year round sources of food and isn't prone to heat stress conditions that can kill thousands of bats in a single day.....
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