AUSTRALIAN native animals come in two main groups. The cute ones – the kangaroos, the koalas, the quokkas – and the terrifying ones, the sharks, the snakes, the spiders.
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Somewhere in between, thought, is another icon of the bush –the flying fox, which most people believe is lovely in its environment, provided that environment is some distance away from civilisation.
A Not In My Back Yard situation that most people can easily sympathise with.
The best-known colony in the Hunter Region is probably the one in Burdekin Park, Singleton, which has defied all sorts of efforts to remove it since the first bats arrived more than 15 years ago.
Now, a group of some 10,000 or so bats is driving people mad at Blackalls Park, and has been, increasingly, for the past three or four years. One of the region’s largest roosts is in the rainforest at Blackbutt, and it’s likely that some of these bats have established smaller colonies in some inner Newcastle suburbs where figs, among other fruiting trees, provide a ready diet.
The silent silhouette of fruit bats gliding in their thousands across the dusk sky is a familiar – and indeed appealing -site.
But for those who are forced to live in close proximity to a colony of shrieking, smelly and potentially disease-carrying bats, there is far less to like. On paper, there are a number of actions that can be taken to counter the problems posed by unwanted bat colonies. The state government’s flying fox camp management policy boasts of the ability to “empower land managers, primarily local councils, to work with their communities to manage flying-fox camps effectively”. The persistence of the Singleton flock, for one, shows that such policies will have their shortcomings while ever the main species in our region, the grey-headed flying fox, is listed as a threatened species. While land-clearing may have disturbed their original habitats, modern flying foxes appear to thrive in, or on the edges of, urban areas, which probably provide them with more food than they would find “in the wild”.
As for the “last resort” actions under the government policy – smoke, noise, water hoses and bright lights – none of these appear to have had much impact. This would seem to leave limited or targeted culling as the obvious next option. If the bats are a threatened species, perhaps the same can be said for the affected residents of Singleton and Blackalls Park.
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